Tibco delivers customer experience in `Civilisation 3.0’

It would seem that, at last, the message is starting to get through to US integration giant, Tibco, that its core message now has to be about the `why’ of integration rather than the `how’. And the `why’ in question is, in the words of Chief Technology Officer, Matt Quinn, about providing the tools to “turn customers, into fans.”

As he told the audience at the company’s annual Tucon conference in Las Vegas, “this is about how you can make the experience for your customers one they will want to experience again.”

Tibco’s focus at the conference is targeting this market of providing its own customers with the tools needed to build Customer Experience Management tools that will help to make their own customers `sticky’. It has most of these tools already, and the company has been working to enhance the integration between them so that they can be closely integrated to create a complete, packaged service, yet loosely coupled so that customers can select just the components it requires.

This comes at a time when the Tibco’s CEO, Vivek Ranadive, sees major change in the air, which has chosen to call Civilisation 3.0. And the population of Civilisation 3.0 will the children of today.

“You won’t see our children installing landline telephones any more, and they will never get lost again,” he told the delegates, in a reference to the key marker of the new civilisation – the smartphone and its derivatives. He also sees everything being connected with everything else. This, in particular, goes for buildings.

Ranadive is well known as an owner of basketball teams, but his interest is not just at sporting level. He expressed himself keenly interested in the way the team can become a social focus and community. His latest indulgence here is the acquisition of the Sacramento Kings, team, and part of the plan is to build a new stadium that will be fully connected so that every visitor can exploit the building’s capabilities and – to be fair – the team as a business can exploit them.

Part of the underpinning of that Civilisation 3.0 vision will be big data analytics. It will be this that drives the much of the data transactions between users and users, users and businesses and businesses to businesses. And this subject was the focus for much of the first day keynote sessions.

There were two main themes here, with the prime one being  the latest upgrade to the company’s Spotfire analytics tools, Version 6. This, according to Quinn, will focus on what he called `operationalising’ big data, and blending it more into the everyday needs of business users. There will be a growing focus here on developing analytics consumption models that can give users a real kick start in applying big data to their businesses.

The theme is the integration of historical data – sometimes referred to as `data at rest’ – with data about real time events. In Tibco’s terms that means integration between Spotfire and Events Manager.

As Quinn put it, big data has reached a stage where its real role within a business needs to be thought through more thoroughly. “The real issue with big data is where we go with it next,” he said. “Big data without events is not interesting for anyone. There is a need to harness past information, yes, but this really does need to be coupled with events as they happen if we are to create real value.

“Tibco gives users the ability to understand the past, and then marry to it the ability to identify patterns in the data. It is the ability to then apply those patterns to real time events - what is happening now – that will allow users to predict the future. The important operational problem here is inserting the information with context and then delivering it to the right people in an appropriate timeframe, so that they can exploit it.”

According to Tibco’s Executive VP for software, Edward Lee, Spotfire 6 will also feature location analytics. He reckons that some 80% of analytics has a location context that can be exploited to provide value. It will also be possible to mash up data from Spotfire with any other third party data.

One addition that seemed to be particularly popular with delegates is mobile metrics. This capability can present important KPIs about a business directly to a mobile phone, together with information on each KPI in terms of the practices that have made it good or bad.

As Quinn observed, Ranadive is well known for the phrase `the two second advantage’ – the title of a book he wrote on the subject, and a phrase he is often minded to use, especially at events like this. And though easy to dismiss as glib, it does sum up that combination of getting an answer of value to the right people – even if it is not yet the `full story’ - in a timescale that itself is of value to the user.

“Getting the full picture on a situation six weeks after a major problem occurred is, in most cases, not that helpful these days,” Quinn said.

Not only can it help predict the event, and so allow preventive action to be taken, it can also allow redemptive action to be taken on thousands of small problems. As an example, he cited a simple online shopping `expedition’ which, when near completion, gets interrupted by one many typical interruptions. The transaction gets abandoned, though the data around it has been created and is still available.

Coupling Spotfire and Event Manager with integration to mobile devices, GPS location services and social networks, it becomes possible for the vendor to be informed that the customer who earlier had abandoned a transaction is now close by a retail outlet that sells the product in question and has them in stock. A message can then be sent to that customer, perhaps with the added attraction of a discount if they buy the product `today’.