Speaking of real-time business, in the Global CIO column, Bob Evans of InformationWeek reports on the “massive promise of real-time business, real-time visibility, and real-time decision-making” as a significant contributor to Tibco’s recent earnings success and go-forward confidence.
From his conversation with Vivek Ranadive, Tibco’s founder and CEO, Evans cites Ranadive’s confidence in the face of “20th century competitors”:
"These are all 20th-century companies [Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft] grasping at the question of ‘How do we become 21st-century companies?’ " he said. ‘How do we change and enhance our core competencies? How do we marry the three great trends of today: event-driven models, cloud computing, and mobility—how do we marry those without destroying our legacy?’ "
On top of that, he said, those big companies with vast rosters of legacy products and entrenched business units find it hard to embrace questions such as "What does the customer of the 21st century look like, or what does the Facebook phenomenon mean to my company, my products, and my customers?"
A large contributor to Tibco’s results was services. According to the article, the reason is two-fold. One, customers are aggressively embracing the shift from “transaction-orientation” to event-driven, and two, there is a shortage of relevant third-party skills. [That’s just fine with me!]
“In a typical engagement we might have a customer with a couple of hundred people on a project and Tibco provides 10% of 15% of them.
"But that is changing—rapidly—and as a result our offshore services business has tripled as we have come across massive—truly massive—opportunities," he said.
"On Sunday, I met with one customer who wants an escalation in Tibco people from the 40 now working on the project to more than 200. This is happening because we want to move them from their old 20th-century infrastructure to event-driven platforms and in order to achieve that with such new technology, we have to do everything.
While projects with hundreds of vendor-supplied consultants tend to make me nervous, it is an interesting data point on customer appetite for change and investment.
More interesting though was Ranadive’s follow-on statement:
"The tipping point has been reached, and an avalanche of people wanting to do this has started."
And yes, that quote is rhetoric-laden. However, in his closing, Bob Evans offers some very positive (and colorful) insights of his own:
“I think Ranadive and Tibco would do very well to grow as rapidly as they can in the next 6 months or so because in spite of his zealot’s protestations to the contrary, IBM and Oracle and SAP are going to come after the real-time market like hungry lions on a herd of young antelopes.”
Let the real-time safari begin!
