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Contributed on January 19, 2018

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TIBCO at the Gartner Application Strategies & Solutions Summit 2017

Blog: The Tibco Blog

In early December 2017, a cadre of TIBCO marketing, product management, and sales individuals joined other enterprise software infrastructure vendors and customers at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to discuss and showcase solutions that help businesses drive growth through digital transformation, innovation, and superior customer experience.

Gartner defined the scope of the event to include both application architecture, as well as customer experience solutions, with the premise that one helps enable the other, which is true to great extent. To truly enable innovative customer experience across multiple channels, an organization must first embrace solutions such as pervasive integration platforms that power those real-time, multi-channel experiences to take shape.

From TIBCO’s perspective, there was a plethora of relevant session content for IT and application development professionals looking to explore the latest trends and innovations in application architecture, development, and integration. In point of fact, one of the top program tracks was named exactly that, and included insightful and timely topics from Gartner’s application infrastructure analysts. Let’s highlight a few of them here…

Massimo Pezzini, VP & Gartner Fellow, delivered a session called “Application Leaders Call to Action: Deliver Pervasive Integration Capabilities to Empower Digital Transformation”. Speaking to the heart of what TIBCO believes, Mr. Pezzini essentially explained why an “unintegrated digital business” is an oxymoron, and how digital business platforms must enable rapid and cost-effective integration across applications, data sources, analytical systems, cloud services, APIs, business networks, and partners.

Gartner Research Directors Elizabeth Golluscio and Keith Guttridge presented a session related to their recent report, “2017 Strategic Roadmap for Application Architecture, Infrastructure and Integration”. This session described how a digital business technology platform (DBTP) is built, not bought, and how leaders responsible for architecture must move towards a multi-grained mesh app and service architecture (MASA), paired with an enterprisewide, pervasive integration competency.

Anne Thomas, VP Distinguished Analyst, and Kirk Knoernschild, Research VP, both delivered sessions related to the now omnipresent topic of “microservices”, and why application architects are looking at how to refactor monolithic applications to improve development agility, and better leverage cloud deployment options. Anne Thomas also covered the related topic of Event-Driven Architecture, and how that pattern enables a shift to more real-time business situation awareness.

Yefim V. Natis, VP & Gartner Fellow, gave a tutorial on “Serverless Platforms, PaaS, and Other Key Trends in Platforms for Digital Business”. This was a broad, all-encompassing session on the cloud as a platform and its role as a foundation technology for digital business.

Mark O’Neill, Research Director, presented a session entitled “To the Point: Beyond API Management—Marketplaces, Monetization and Ecosystems”, where he discussed the evolution of APIs as being not only an integration technology, but treated as products in a business ecosystem.

All these topics aligned with TIBCO’s portfolio of solutions to help our customers establish a foundation for digital business and accelerate their pace of digital transformation. At the TIBCO booth, our product and sales teams provided visitors with demonstrations of our pervasive integration solutions, lead by TIBCO Cloud Integration, and highlighted examples of how some of our 10,000+ customers, including T-Mobile, EagleView, and others, have achieved positive business outcomes.

TIBCO also presented a breakout session, “Addressing the Need for Modern Pervasive Integration”. I had the pleasure of joining Rahul Kamdar, Director of Product Management, and Bruce Harris, Director of Business Applications, from one of our valued customers, EagleView. I discussed how integration has evolved from connecting monolithic applications over an enterprise service bus paradigm, to becoming the pervasive, connective tissue that binds modern application services based on APIs, microservices, and event-driven architecture patterns. Bruce gave a fantastic overview of how EagleView leveraged TIBCO’s cloud integration technology to automate their order-to-cash process, and achieved 100% sales-to-marketing attribution. Finally, Rahul presented a hands-on demonstration of some of the powerful new capabilities in the TIBCO Cloud Integration suite.

We wrapped up the exhibit hall portion of the event with some cool giveaways, and continued to have interesting discussions with visitors and analysts during the cocktail hour. We also had the pleasure of some face-to-face meetings with the aforementioned Gartner analysts, and enjoyed exchanging views on where the market is headed.

Key takeaways from the event:

1. A pervasive integration strategy is a key enabler of digital transformation. Create a roadmap to establish this foundation within your organization over time.
2. Evaluate existing and new applications within your portfolio for opportunities to best leverage microservices and event driven patterns. Select components or domains that can be re-used across applications to implement as microservices
3. Experiment with various cloud deployment options to compare operational and financial costs, to find what works best for your organization.
4. Develop a competency for recognizing and reducing technical debt, by leveraging solutions that abstract and accelerate development tasks.

If you’re interested in trying our hybrid integration technology, we welcome you to sign up for the TIBCO Cloud Integration trial here, or watch an on-demand demo here. If you are an Amazon Web Services fan, you can spin up an instance of TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition on AWS Marketplace here. Thanks for reading!