TIBCO’s CEO talked with ChannelBuzz about the company’s recent customer event, and how their long-time data strategy is getting new synergies in the COVID era.
Dan Streetman, TIBCO’s CEO
Unlike more than a few virtual customer events in the Year of COVID, last week’s TIBCO NOW conference actually did have news – quite a lot of news. The main messaging revolved around vision, however. The company emphasized the salience of the ability of their platform to handle the demands placed on organizations today by the intensification of digital transformation, which they believe to be unique in the marketplace.
“For 20 years we have been at the heart of solving complex challenges with data, and we have a tremendous heritage of innovation around accessing data you have to seamlessly connect to,” said Dan Streetman, TIBCO’s CEO. “We are unique in our ability to intelligently unify that data, and then use visualization data science and AI to indicate what’s next.
“The need for sustainable innovation is stronger than ever,” he declared. “This is what we do.”
The consistent message from all the IT industry events this summer and fall is that the COVID pandemic has greatly intensified organizations’ digital transformation methods, driving those years ahead in an equivalent number of months. Streetman also stressed this theme, emphasizing that the nature of the changes have been transformed as well as the amount.
“What’s important about the pandemic is that it has accelerated digital transformation rather than just one-shot innovation,” he stated. “This is a great example of why the world needs companies like TIBCO. One thing we are focusing on this year is Any Data – that you have to be able to access data from multiple sources. Then once you have it, you have to be able to access it with AI and machine learning, and then bring it all together in a unified experience.”
TIBCO launched the Any Data Hub at TIBCO NOW, a comprehensive data management blueprint for deploying data across distributed data environments. The framework offers necessary capabilities to support the demand for accurate and consistent data across the organization with trust and control, aligning IT and the business. Like TIBCO Hyperconverged Analytics and the TIBCO Responsive Application Mesh, the other two focus areas at the event, Any Data and the Any Data hubs are architectural blueprints rather than products, designed to facilitate digital transformation initiatives.
“These all relate to the idea of the connected experience, which is inherent to everything we are doing inside the products and ecosystem,” Streetman said. “It all ties into the idea of a connected experience and how it drives customer excellence.”
The event was heavy on customer case studies to demonstrate how TIBCO’s technology is being used to execute these initiatives.
“Panera Bread is a customer of ours,” Streetman said. “Their business model was retail focused, and with the pandemic, people were stuck at homes and couldn’t go to their stores. Using our technology, in under 8 days, they launched Panera Grocery for online ordering for either delivery or curbside grocery pickup. They made that pivot extremely quickly. It’s critical how quickly an organization is able to adjust and make real time decisions, especially customers who are in industries that have been challenged by the present situation. If a company like Panera didn’t have a great integrated data strategy with TIBCO, they wouldn’t have been able to do any of those things that they did.”
While some people, particularly media, frown on virtual events, Streetman said that the virtual format of this event, while dictated by pandemic lockdowns, has certain advantages in presenting this kind of messaging.
“It is now easier to tailor content because you have no limitations of physical space any more,” he said “That enables you to tailor content to specific groups. The virtual format also lets you break the constraints of time, so you can see the same content. This is an example of being at the edge of sustainable innovation, driving the connected experience, and using some of our own technology to do it in a way to deliver that’s specific for people. The virtual event will also attract any thousands more attendees than we typically get to our physical event.”
