Fast Data: A Process, Not A Product
Blog: The Tibco Blog
Innovation and entrepreneurship course through the veins of TIBCO. Its visionary DNA is compounded by a heritage that boasts a number of firsts, from trailblazing the enterprise software market to digitizing Wall Street in the 80s.
It is still the early days in my new role as Senior Vice President of EMEA, but this pedigree is already keenly felt and is inspiring a vision that will build on TIBCO’s cloud proposition and the momentum of the recent acquisition of API management leader, Mashery. The ultimate goal is to empower customers to make informed, business-critical decisions.
The opportunity to draw upon a long-established and proven entrepreneurial track record and to be at the forefront of game-changing technology was a compelling proposition and one which I’m committed to expanding through my passion for the cloud. Furthermore, this aligns perfectly with the overriding focus on Fast Data and the supporting TIBCO integration, analytics, and event processing technologies. These technologies permeate the business’s offering, which I will be sharing enthusiastically with our customers.
Interestingly, a brief trawl through the TIBCO archive reminded me that Fast Data’s earliest incarnations can be traced back to the mid-80s when company founder Vivek Ranadivé devised a software-based version of the computer “bus”—the system that governs data communication between the CPU, memory, and other I/O devices. In doing so, it enabled messaging to happen on a computer network in real time. A quarter of a century later, and Fast Data has started to come to prominence, differentiated and out of the shadows from its more-established big data cousin to become part and parcel of our business rhetoric.
The concept itself is relatively straightforward, and only gets slightly more complicated when it comes to actually putting it into practice. Most of us are aware that big data mainly involves collecting and working with large amounts of data at rest. The trend has long been to analyze data after it has been collected, aggregated, and re-formatted to suit the analytic tools involved, typically run offline by business intelligence teams.
Fast Data expands on this by adding the ability to handle data in motion; making better use of data resources by analyzing and acting on rapidly changing data sets in real time or as close to real time as current technologies allow.
It’s a field that I’m committed to exploring further. I don’t profess to know every nuance, and at times I will also be on a learning curve that echoes the journey of our customers, but I’m particularly buoyed by the role of the cloud and the capabilities in making Fast Data ever more accessible. Increasingly, it is the cloud where data is collected and held, as well as where the applications that can analyze and act upon it are found. All of this explains the general move towards making TIBCO technologies—already popular in the enterprise data centre—more widely available for use via the cloud. Additionally, as cloud-based services grow in popularity, it’s where the next step forward is being implemented. That involves the use of managed API services, such as those provided through TIBCO Mashery, to allow the free, yet controlled, interchange of information between applications, without the need for complex programming or prior aggregation, reformatting of data, and so on.
Together, with tools like TIBCO Simplr, designed to give applications access to data held by public services, the cloud is where managed APIs will live and where this next big step on the path to Fast Data is already being put into practice.
It’s an exciting new chapter in TIBCO’s already compelling story and one that I feel very fortunate to help drive.
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