One guy’s summary of TUCON 2013

TIBCO’s TUCON 2013 in Las Vegas wrapped up on Thursday and today, two days later, I’ve had the chance to reflect on what was most interesting. Here are my takeaways:

Civilization 3.0

In the opening keynote, CEO Vivek Ranadivé told the audience that we’re entering a new era that he called Civilization 3.0. He broke earlier civilizations out as the pre-industrial 1.0 where humans were individual contributors as craftsmen, artisans and guilds, and 2.0 as the era of the industrialization and the rise of the corporation to create human efficiency. ComputerWorld reports that according to Ranadivé, we’re reentered the era of individual value creators.

According to Ranadivé, this is the age of platforms that are big despite not owning anything. For example, the world’s biggest bookstore (Amazon) has no physical bookstores, the world’s biggest taxi company (Uber) doesn’t have any taxis and the world’s biggest maker of mobile chips Qualcomm doesn’t have any factories.

Understanding Civilization 3.0 is about seeing the major forces shaping it, which include the digitization of everything (Big Data), the sudden rise of mobile computing, and the emergence of platforms.

Back to integration basics

Another thread woven through TUCON 2013 was the critical nature of integration. Each customer in turn talked about aligning their information, systems and people across an enterprise backbone that allows big data, mobility, cloud apps and social media data to be effectively used. These powerful trends, called the Nexus of Forces by Gartner, offer great opportunity to companies that wrestle the integration challenge to the ground.

For Royal Caribbean, that means giving ships far better onboard connectivity. For grocery giant Kroger, that means digitizing the store shelf, allowing personalization of the shopping experience. For Norfolk Southern, that means better asset utilization by integrating 400 applications that run their railroad in real-time. For consumer preference giant Nielsen, it means pulling together retail tracking and insights in minutes rather than months, so that Nielsen’s customers can make decisions immediately about how and where to sell.

Social media is an expectation

Several customers took the stage to talk about the power of collaboration and information sharing in the enterprise. KPMG‘s CIO Harry Moseley talked about social media touching everything we do and that their use of social media has sped up the cadence of change within the professional services giant. Yellow Pages Canada talked about enterprise-wide collaboration on new marketing initiatives.

In a sign of the maturation of social media at work, Tibbr announced Pages, a way for users to curate content into a single view of a topic that offers an alternative to a scrolling conversation. The sure sign of social media’s acceptance is the layering of new use cases on the well-known patterns of streaming discussions.

We can make the world better

In my favorite breakout session, World Vision Lead Architect Danny Mar showed how the aid organization is using a very modern architecture to connect donors with the work they fund. World Vision works across the planet and in some of the most remote and least technology-enabled parts. By using the world’s best combination of integration technologies, World Vision connects those who give with those who receive while freeing field workers from onerous manual reporting work.

It was heart warming to see integration technology used to connect haves and have nots to make the world a better place.

Siemens Healthcare talked about the power of evidence-based process as a way to bring down the cost of healthcare while improving outcomes. Their Soarian product allows healthcare networks to be more accountable for the services they deliver by putting intelligent structure in place to guide medical professionals in the execution of patient care. With healthcare at 18% of the US GDP, it is great to see companies using process, event processing and system integration to make a difference.

Big Data has to be actionable

Last but certainly not least, TUCON 2013 put a focus on the need for actionable analytics, from insights Nielsen provides to customers to organizations like Swiss Federal Railway putting iPads in the hands of every train driver to optimize their network. Analytics software allows centrally-connected controllers to make predictions about the future state of the rail network and intervene with instructions to the trains as potential problems arise based on real-time conditions. Not only can accidents be averted, but fuel savings of 2-3% will make a big difference in operating cost.

TUCON 2013 was an excellent showcase of where the world is very quickly headed. The executives and customers who spoke each represented forward-thinking applications of technology that will be commonplace in the coming years.

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Christopher Taylor