21st Century technology is finally here

This afternoon I was able to sit in on a session delivered by TIBCO’s Ivan Casanova, Creating 21st Century Applications in an Event Enabled Enterprise.

Data in motion, data at rest

Ivan took the audience through a detailed look at how the Gartner Nexus of Forces plays itself out in the real world. He provided examples that focused on organizations that marry data at rest…the things we know about our business and customers, with data in motion…the events that are occurring in real-time as business executes. At TIBCO, this is called the 2-Second Advantage, not coincidentally, the title of a book written by TIBCO’s Founder and CEO Vivek Ranadive.

Repeating a Keynote theme, Ivan brought up the challenge of rising IT costs connected to maintaining old infrastructure. This common problem leaves less budget to fund innovation and hampers response to a changing business and technology landscape. IT leaders, under increasing cost pressure, get sidestepped when other parts of the enterprise, especially Marketing, grow frustrated with the argument that money is tight. This pattern creates distrust between the business and IT and leads to a downward cycle for the organization.

TIBCO has been liberating customers from this cycle through the use of their Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a publish-subscribe integration technology that allows organizations to unwind their spaghetti integrations and create smart, orderly flows of information. TIBCO customers have a leg up on managing the Nexus of Forces as information is liberated from data silos and made available across an ESB. Once liberated, it becomes part of an ‘event cloud’ of dynamic and static information and can easily be correlated in ways that create opportunities and mitigate risk. It allows information, social, mobile and cloud, Gartner’s Nexus, to be managed efficiently.

20% discount on steaks

The ESB and other integration technologies are a hedge against disruption by the competition. Looking forward, integration will decide the haves and have nots.

Bringing it together, Ivan talked about a Las Vegas casino customer that uses TIBCO software for a loyalty program that tracks customer preferences and history. This casino marries that data with events in the moment..events like a reservation being made, check-in at reception and perhaps a gambling loss. That information matters enormously when blended with an oversupply of steak at the casino’s steakhouse and allows the brand to make offers on perishable inventory to customers who perhaps need a break from the action. The story provided a great example of what a 21st Century application can be in an event-enabled enterprise.

Full disclosure, I work for TIBCO…but that doesn’t diminish the story.

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Christopher Taylor