Tibco's Enterprise 3.0 Evangelising
Turning down an opportunity to attend Tibco Software's TUCON event in Las Vegas this week was hard enough, trying to get Microsoft Word to accept the word 'Evangelising' without using a Z was even harder. Regardless, I had a late briefing yesterday with Tibco's Ram Menon who is one of the company's executive VP men-of-the-moment when it comes to Enterprise 3.0 evangelising.
But wait, Enterprise 3.0? We're only just dealing with web 2.0, ecommerce 2.0 and broadcast 2.0 aren't we? Even UK government 2.0 is still a far cry off surely (I promise to stop going on about it), so how much headspace do we have for Enterprise 3.0 and what is it anyway? I will come on to that I promise.
Well Tibco (sorry about the lower case chaps) is reportedly using its TUCON event this week to launch "several new software platforms" into its total software integration infrastructure. That was platform(s), plural OK?
NB: talking to Ram Menon I found out that the product refreshes announced this week are of such a scale that Tibco's marketing machine has decided to label the new tools as platform launches. Hmm, it's a bit cheeky, but I get the gist and I think it's worth making this clarification here.
TIBCO’s vision for Enterprise 3.0 sees technology delivering the right information in the right place at the right time within the right context.
Or to put in another way, real-time event driven decision making tools for applications that are inherently architected for speed and scale in web 2.0 facing environments driven by cloud computing, multi-core processors and in-memory architecture – the total of which is greater than the sum of all the parts, hence it is not enterprise 2.0 but Enterprise 3.0. My words not Tibco's OK?
TIBCO founder and CEO Vivek Ranadivé, not averse to a spot of evangelical enthusiasm himself, likes to promote his forthcoming book the Two Second Advantage by coincidentally ending his quotes with the term 'two-second advantage'.
“Success is no longer determined by how much information people can collect. If you have just a little bit of the right information beforehand - it could be two seconds or two minutes, or even two hours beforehand - it is more valuable than all the information in the world days or weeks later. We’re giving our customers that critical two-second advantage.”
So let's count them off, the new technologies being introduced this week are TIBCO ActiveMatrix 3.0, TIBCO BusinessEvents 4.0, TIBCO Silver (the company's cloud brand) and TIBCO Spotfire 3.1 – oh and the TIBCO Active Spaces suite. That's where they get the whole new platform launch effort, let's go with it for today.
As is my want to pay homage to my journalist beat, I asked Tibco's Menon what the message here for developers should be.
"Well look back in history with our technology infrastructures and you can see that knitting together apps has always been hard work - and we have all been working to try and make this easier for some time now," said Menon. "The key now is creating the opportunity to develop, manage and deploy through one single interface – and for us this is Tibco Business Studio based on Eclipse – a universal application environment which has been available for around two years or so and is offered for free download to developers who recognise the need for a visual modeling tool of this kind."
Tibco no doubt hopes developers will want to use this tool in concert with the major new product refreshes announced this week so that it's Enterprise 3.0 Evangelising takes root.
At 600 words in this blog I will stop as I have 6000 words of press materials to read on this subject and I think it's appropriate to point out that I'm only one tenth of the way through with the above comments. If it hadn't been for ash clouds, my own man flu and the fact that I'm already booked for Novell BrainShare in Amsterdam next week I would have been in Vegas, Baby!