TIBCO Steps Up Partner Initiatives, Incentives For Building Big Data Solutions

At this week’s TIBCO Now 2021 virtual conference TIBCO unveiled a wide range of new capabilities and enhancements to its data analytics, management and connectivity software portfolio with an eye to encouraging partners to develop vertical industry solutions on the company’s platforms.

Big data software developer TIBCO debuted a wave of product expansions and enhancements across its technology portfolio this week, most focused on the ability of the company’s integrated offerings to work with data in real-time across on-premises and cloud systems.

The new product capabilities come in the wake of TIBCO’s acquisition of business analytics pioneer Information Builders in January and accelerated business transformation efforts by customers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What customers needed and when they needed it changed almost overnight,” TIBCO CEO Dan Streetman (pictured) said in an interview with CRN, calling the pandemic and its economic impact “a major accelerator of digital transformation.”

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TIBCO has become one of the biggest players in the big data connectivity and analytics arena in recent years, bolstered by a series of acquisitions in data analytics (Information Builders, Jaspersoft, Spotfire and Alpine Data Labs); data integration technology (Scribe Software and Cisco Systems’ data virtualization business); and master data management (Orchestra Networks), among others.

Today TIBCO organizes its product offerings around the three pillars of Connect, Unify and Predict, and this week’s announcements, made during the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s TIBCO Now 2021 virtual conference, followed those lines.

“We unlock the power of real-time data and make faster, smarter decisions,” Streetman said in the interview, previewing his TIBCO Now 2021 keynote. “When you’re looking at solving the end-to-end challenge of unlocking real-time data, TIBCO stands alone.”

TIBCO executives stressed the importance of the role partners play in extending the company’s software and adding capabilities for vertical industries.

“As we deliver innovation faster and faster, [partners’] ability to keep pace is important,” Streetman said. “We’re very excited about unlocking the power of our partner ecosystem, certainly for delivery and for customer success, but also innovation for specific use cases and being able to unlock the power of real-time data.”

“We really want to push our ecosystem to build solutions on our platforms,” said Tony Beller, TIBCO senior vice president of worldwide partner ecosystem and OEM sales, also in an interview with CRN.

Under a TIBCO program the company this year has seen more systems integrator and ISV developer partners working together to build solutions for key vertical industries such as financial services, manufacturing, and oil and gas, Beller said. The channel chief also noted that the company has trained and certified 12,000 partner consultants on TIBCO software this year, doubling the number of certified consultants overall.

“You need to enable partners,” TIBCO CTO Matt Quinn said, also in an interview with CRN. “We’re making it so that [partner] offerings around our software are more valuable than just our software standalone.”

Quinn cited TIBCO’s open APIs, a solutions frameworks guide and other resources the company offers partner developers. “They’re servicing vertical markets that we can’t possibly service with horizontal solutions.”

The company is also expanding its TIBCO Labs program, which enables customers and partners to develop their own innovations on top of TIBCO systems. Available through TIBCO Cloud, the new capabilities include TIBCO Cloud Discover, which provides transparency into business processes using application data; TIBCO Cloud Composer for developing cloud solutions and applications using the vendor’s integration, data management and analytics technologies; and TIBCO Labs Gallery for access to TIBCO Labs’ interactive demos and developments in IoT, blockchain, edge analytics, augmented reality and composable apps.

Within the Predicts portfolio of analytical software TIBCO launched a slew of enhancements to TIBCO Spotfire, TIBCO Data Science, TIBCO Streaming and TIBCO WebFocus – the latter the flagship product from Information Builders. The company unveiled the Spotfire Mods framework that customers and partners will use to build new data visualizations within Spotfire, for example, and added new cloud-native and containerized deployment capabilities to WebFocus.

TIBCO uses the phrase “hyperconverged analytics” to describe how the company’s data analysis software is enhanced by its data connectivity and data management technology, providing a contrast with vendors of standalone data analytics tools.

Within the TIBCO Connect line of software the company unveiled TIBCO Cloud API Management for full API lifecycle management as part of the TIBCO Cloud. Also debuting were new automation capabilities in TIBCO Cloud Integration for key business processes and workflows and new cloud-native storage options for TIBCO Cloud Messaging.

Providing partners and customers with a “connected experience” is key given the vendor’s expansive product portfolio, CTO Quinn said.

“For us it’s a big, big deal because we’ve got a lot of individual components and capabilities and people use a lot of them together,” he said. “And we want to make sure it all works together seamlessly.”

And on the TIBCO Unify side the company unveiled the TIBCO DQ product line that incorporates the company’s data quality tools with built-in AI and machine learning capabilities to automate data quality detection, monitoring and anomaly resolution. The company also detailed enhancements to the TIBCO Data Virtualization and TIBCO EBX master data management software.