How “Better Together” Technology Combinations Drives Better Agility

Blog: The Tibco Blog

With the dramatic rise in the importance of AI and automation, digital business leaders are faced with a daunting challenge: they need to simultaneously become more insight-driven, more automated, and more agile.

Innovative technology is the solution. But technology is also a challenge, as too many tools are inefficient and too few tools are incomplete. How can organizations find the right balance?

At TIBCO we believe the perfect balance occurs when our best-in-class tools are elegantly pre-integrated, yet also open to working with other tools that our customers already own. As an example, TIBCO^®Data Virtualization is pre-integrated with TIBCO’s flagship BI tool, Spotfire^®, but it also works well with Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. Sure, it’s faster and better to use Spotfire, but we happily support whatever tools matter for our customers.

Reflective of this strategy, TIBCO has acquired several best-in-class enterprise software companies in the last 18 months, helping catapult us to leadership positions in five new software categories: Data Science (via Statistica), iPaaS (via Scribe), Data Preparation (via Alpine Data), Data Virtualization (via Composite/Cisco), and Master Data Management (via Orchestra Networks).

As the SVP and GM of TIBCO’s analytics business, it’s my job to steer our data and analytics acquisitions to help strike this perfect balance for our customers. So when TIBCO considers acquisitions, we also apply a key principle we call “better together,” which ensures that TIBCO products, when combined, strengthen each other to deliver far more business value, far faster, than when used standalone. So one plus one doesn’t have to just equal two.

As I review our recent acquisitions, along with our already strong data and analytics product portfolio, here are five examples of how organizations like yours can use these combinations to drive more business value and agility.

Streaming Business Intelligence

In November 2018, TIBCO unveiled Spotfire^® X, combining visualization, analytics and real-time data streams to create a fully streaming, real-time business intelligence (BI) platform. This combination of technologies can serve as the intelligent real-time brain guiding your digital nervous system so you can compete more effectively in today’s digital business world.

Streaming BI based on live data streams is only possible with this “better together” combination of TIBCO products. To make it easy for you, we combined several TIBCO streaming analytics capabilities and Spotfire^® X together, which makes it as easy to analyze in-flight data streams as it is to analyze an Excel Spreadsheet. You just connect to streaming data, and the entire BI experience becomes live and continuously updated.

By combining with TIBCO^® Cloud Integration, TIBCO’s market-leading iPaaS solution, you can also connect streaming BI with anything else you might want from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to on-premises databases and applications, to cloud services. Furthermore, this cloud-deployable solution easily adapts to your needs as your requirements expand. So you can start small and grow, with all the reliability, availability, and scalability you expect from TIBCO.

Adaptive Machine Learning

Most machine learning trains on historical data with the assumption that the patterns found in the data will hold in the future. Yet when these algorithms are deployed, the ability to adaptively learn, directly from the real-time data stream as new data arrives, can yield even smarter models and better results. By combining TIBCO^® Data Science and TIBCO^® Streaming, TIBCO radically improves on the traditional machine learning process, making it both adaptive and in real time. Only TIBCO provides this powerful combination.

Not only are your training models improved, but by applying adaptive machine learning models on live data streams, you can also use machine learning models to monitor and react to your latest real-time data. Your models continuously re-evaluate key factors and either present your results in a highly visual way or with the addition of TIBCO^® Cloud Integration, automatically take action.

These techniques are helping digital businesses like yours better optimize industrial IoT equipment operations on the fly as conditions change. For example, oil rigs and high-tech manufacturing equipment use this data science and streaming combination to learn from connected sensors.

A Unified View of Enterprise Data Assets

By combining TIBCO^® Data Virtualization, TIBCO EBX, TIBCO SnappyData, and TIBCO Cloud Integration, customers can realize the ultimate objective of data asset management: a well-governed 360-degree view of anything and everything including your customers, products, organization, supply chain, and more. Only TIBCO provides this unique and powerful combination.

TIBCO Data Virtualization provides one, easy-to-access place to go for your data so you can accelerate analytical business value. EBX helps you manage, govern, and consume your most important shared data assets in an integrated, coherent way. TIBCO SnappyData provides a lightning-fast, scalable unified analytics fabric for Spark. And TIBCO Cloud Integration lets you integrate business processes that span your systems, data, and people across both on-premises and in the cloud.

With this combination, you gain a more accurate view of your business across functions, can trust the insights and decisions derived from your data and are able to resolve inconsistencies that can lead to significant risk.

Master Data-Driven Analytics and BI Reporting

One of the classic challenges in analytics and BI is “why don’t these reports match?” More than an inconvenience, this level of reporting quality is unacceptable in regulated businesses such as health care and financial services.

EBX provides a complete solution for managing and distributing reference data such as postal codes, cost centers, financial hierarchies, dimensions, and more. Whether the data is externally mandated or internally authored, EBX makes it unambiguous and non-negotiable and thus delivers the consistency and compliance that high-quality reporting requires.

Achieving this quality standard is easier with TIBCO. TIBCO Spotfire^® and TIBCO^® Data Science users can automatically ingest and use reference data managed by EBX out-of-the-box. Only TIBCO provides this “better together” advantage.

Comprehensive, Intelligent, Automated IoT Systems

Intelligence-driven IoT systems help Rome Airport, and hundreds of other TIBCO customers address a myriad of transportation, manufacturing, oil and gas drilling, smart cities, and other digital transformation opportunities. But as you know, building these systems is challenging as it requires the capture and analysis of diverse data-in-motion and data-at-rest across devices on the edge, intermediate repositories, centralized data centers, and the cloud.

By adding open-source Flogo^®, an edge integration component designed for IoT edge deployment, to the offerings already described, TIBCO gives you the key infrastructure you need to deliver intelligent, edge-to-center IoT systems more easily than ever. Here is how these offerings can work better together to your benefit:

1. Flogo^® captures device data as events occur, at the edge.

2. TIBCO Streaming automates decisions based on real-time data streams and rules defined by IT.

3. Business analysts leverage Spotfire^® Data Streams to analyze live conditions.

4. EBX adds consistency and validation to your IoT-connected data assets.

5. To analyze data-at-rest with Spotfire^®, Data Virtualization provides the 360-degree view of data you require.

6. And to drive even greater intelligence and impact over time, the adaptive learning models you create in TIBCO Data Science can be deployed by Flogo^® and Spotfire^® as they become smarter.

It all boils down to agility

One of our many IoT-automated airport customers used several of the product combinations above to deploy a fully automated, intelligent airport in 12 weeks with a team of 6 people. Not only were they able to connect thousands of vehicles, assets, and systems, they also deployed new intelligent algorithms every week in an agile way.

That kind of agility can only be accomplished with innovative “better together” technology combinations. By reducing the friction between tools, we aim to drive 15x, 50x, 100x, and more value for our customers, and to help you do so with lightning-fast agility. Great products, a powerful “better together” principle and an innovation ethos are key. Let’s keep pushing boundaries together.