post-event coverage: tibco now 2016 The digital experience of the customer is so dynamic that you have to automate your response in order to really be responsive.
Nearly 2,000 IT executives attended TIBCO NOW 2016
too late, you miss the window of opportunity,” Kurzweil noted. There were more than 100 breakout sessions arranged in three tracks where industry experts talked about API management, cloudnative architecture, leveraging fast data, the internet of things, and other pertinent trends and issues in IT. The event was attended by nearly 2,000 IT executives and was supported by 25 sponsors. Real-time is the new norm In his keynote speech at the opening day of the conference, Rode said most of the problems and strategies that digital businesses are facing have, at their core, integration and dealing with data analytics as two key needs. He noted that most of the digital transformations we see today have three common challenges: 1) there is a need for a seamless form of interconnection among the parts that make up the solution; 2) there is a need to move and understand a lot of information in real-time; 3) there is an increasing element of analysing and predicting what to do next. “The digital experience of the customer is so dynamic that you have to automate your response in order to really be responsive. A lot of companies used to not care about this whole notion of real-time but today it’s conventional wisdom for everyone: real-time is the new norm,” he added. From the core to the edge Another interesting facet of the digital business is that it’s not just about enabling companies to operate more efficiently, but it’s also
about giving the customer a richer experience. To enable this, TIBCO is also shifting its focus from the core to the edge. “It used to be we were selling a lot of technology to improve the core, the systems of record, the data centres. What we’re seeing today is a shift more to the edge. It’s these outer systems, these service points to the customers, that require a slightly different application of the kind of technologies we provide,” Rode said. “This is why we have simplified the way we position what we do as falling into two big categories: interconnecting everything (people and processes, systems and data, APIs) and augmenting intelligence (dashboarding, embedded reporting, data visualisation, streaming analytics),” he added. Focused innovation Matt Quinn, TIBCO’s chief technology officer and EVP for products & technology, also spoke about the company’s products and services. “We are continuing to invest a significant amount in focused innovation. From an engineering perspective, it is important to think not just about what we are building, but also how we build them.” Quinn revealed three core principles that were developed early last year about the way TIBCO builds its products: cloud first, ease of use, and industrialisation. “Everybody defines cloud differently. What we wanted to do with our products is think about cloud and cloud architecture first and foremost - whether they are on premise or in
the cloud. What we also needed to recognise is that there are multiple different flavors of cloud and cloud journeys,” said Quinn. Ease of use is all about shortening the time to results. It involves improving user experience, industry solutions and frameworks, and building a community. Finally, industrialisation is about enriching the TIBCO ecosystem, and it is made up of three aspects: improved cross-product integration (85% of customers use more than one TIBCO product, so all products need to be highly integrated to bring more value to customers), improved DevOps support (TIBCO started to work closer with the broader industry to make sure the products fit within other modern architectures), and internet of things (IoT). “Our goal is to be everywhere. We are expanding the platform where you need us and we’re doing it in the easiest possible way,” said Quinn. New products Two of the many products launched at the conference were Project Flogo and TIBCO Graph Database. Project Flogo is an ultra-lightweight integration software solution that introduces open source licensing to enable developers in building the broadest open IoT community. Project Flogo functions as one the first design bots for IoT edge application development, with a tilebased, zero-code environment for building and deploying integration and data processing directly onto connected devices. Meanwhile, the TIBCO Graph Database is a translytical database that transforms a complex web of dynamic data into meaningful, comprehensible, and traversable relationships to help deliver real-time insight and action. It stores all data as intelligent schema that makes it easy to discover and model any relationships as graphs with nodes and edges. Combined, these technologies increase interconnectivity, make communication seamless, augment the intelligence of the IoT, and expand the edge of digital business for organisations. By Roxanne Primo Uy HONG KONG BUSINESS | SEPTEMBER 2016 39