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TIBCO, Enterprise 3.0 and the two-second advantage
Monday, May 24, 2010 by Neil Ward-Dutton
At TIBCO’s TUCON user conference a couple of weeks back, CEO Vivek Ranadivé unveiled the themes that his company plans to use to anchor its marketing over the next year at least: Enterprise 3.0 and the “two-second advantage”. Unsurprisingly given his predilection for publishing books that provide the backstories for his company’s direction (see The Power of Now and The Power to Predict), the “two second advantage” is also the title a forthcoming book from the CEO.
So – does this idea make sense? In my view, yes – with qualifications.
It’s important to say that Ranadivé is quick to point out that the advantage he’s talking about doesn’t have to be two seconds; it could be two minutes, two hours or two days. What’s important is the challenge: imagine what you could do if you could understand enough of what’s going on just a little bit before your competitors. TIBCO is taking this idea and using it to illustrate the value of event-driven IT infrastructure: it’s using the idea to highlight examples in industries like mobile telecoms, financial services, healthcare, and travel & transport.
Basically, TIBCO’s approach, at a high level, boils down to the company saying “we understand what it takes to build event-driven IT infrastructure that delivers information quickly around large and complex organisations, and we understand what that can mean to a company – because we’ve been helping companies do it for decades.” [As an aside, part of me wonders why this doesn't form the core of its campaign, but there you go].
So far so good, then. But here’s the qualification: TIBCO has to be very honest with its market, because it would be very tempting – but very dangerous – to tell this story simplistically, trying to convince potential customers that everything they do has to be event-driven, real-time and so on.
At TUCON, we heard two assertions repeated together: first, that the volume of enterprise data is inflating rapidly; and second, that the ‘half life’ of enterprise data’s value is decreasing at an ever faster rate. Now I can buy both these statements: what I have trouble with is whether the same necessarily holds true for the *same* data. Most of the inflation in enterprise data volumes can be attributed to email, email attachments and rich media. Most of the data with a ‘half life’ issue lives elsewhere. Yes there are information management problems here: but I think the “two second advantage” has to be more nuanced than this.
The truth is that there are some parts of many enterprises’ activities which would definitely benefit from being event-driven – but the thing to watch out for is that pesky old consideration of ROI. The value of some kinds of enterprise data may decrease rapidly over time; but this is a statement about its *relative* value. Is the *absolute* value of that data high enough, when it’s fresh, to deliver a return on the investment that would be required to make the necessary infrastructure change?
If TIBCO can be smart and honest about the scope and applicability of the two-second advantage, I think we’re on safe ground. The concept parlays directly from TIBCO’s experience on trading floors into other industries – taking TIBCO’s core original competency (event bus) and playing it out in other scenarios. In this way it’s a little like IBM’s Smarter Planet theme.
Now, though – don’t get me started on Enterprise 3.0. All I’ll say here is that (much as I’m generally against the idea of versioning concepts) the term Enterprise 2.0 has become pretty widely understood already, and it has nothing at all to do with client-server technology infrastructure.
For TIBCO, “Enterprise 3.0″ is just shorthand for a combination of BPM, SOA and business analytics. It’s almost as if TIBCO has been panicked into Enterprise 3.0 by the recent rhetoric of Johnny-come-lately Progress (which, following its acquisition of BPM specialist Savvion and the combination of this with its 2005 acquisition of Apama, has started positioning itself as helping customers with “Responsive Process Management”).
The two-second advantage has the potential to play strongly for TIBCO; Enterprise 3.0, to me, is the sound of a company trying too hard.
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