TIBCO buys Nimbus Partners to deepen its process improvement story

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 by Neil Ward-Dutton

It might not be on the same scale as HP buying Autonomy, but today’s purchase of UK-based software vendor Nimbus Partners by TIBCO is still pretty important news in the BPM space. Nimbus, a UK-based provider of what might be described as a “process knowledge management” platform (my words, not Nimbus’) called Control is pretty small (it has annual revenues of around £10m and around 100 employees) and so this is hardly in the league of HP buying Autonomy – but for TIBCO it could be pretty significant.

In a pre-announcement call I had with TIBCO earlier, the addition of Nimbus Control to the TIBCO portfolio was pitched in the context of “doing more to help people at the front end of the BPM continuum, in process analysis and discovery“. But that’s not quite right – Control isn’t an analysis platform in the way that IDS Scheer’s ARIS (for example) is. Indeed, Nimbus has long positioned Control as almost an “anti ARIS”: it’s designed to be used by shop-floor workers and general managers and administrators rather than ‘process scientists’.

Despite quite a low industry profile, Nimbus has built up a customer base around 700 strong with some big marquee name customers – including AstraZeneca, RBS, Toyota, Sara Lee, HSBC, and Carphone Warehouse. Control is available as an on-premise application or as a hosted service; the vast majority of new customer engagements start with use of the hosted option.

What’s also interesting, and potentially very important for TIBCO, is that Control is rarely sold to IT – it’s sold to governance and compliance people, operations directors, and line of business managers. It’s sold consultatively and ‘BPM’ is rarely mentioned. Nimbus Control isn’t about automation; it’s more about helping customers build ‘interactive operations manuals’ that help to provide structure and repeatabilityto processes that don’t fit an automation approach for whatever reason.

Nimbus is happy to point out that historically it’s had a hard time selling to IT, and this has slowed down sales cycles; part of the challenge for it has been that Control doesn’t fit neatly into any mainstream product category (including BPA). TIBCO can help with the IT selling angle; but it’s important to recognise, too, that Nimbus can potentially give TIBCO a massive leg-up in terms of developing a more business-engaged field sales capability.

Nimbus said it was in the market for an investment of some kind to take the company to next level: setting up a West Coast US office (as it did a few months ago) was part of that. It seems the TIBCO acquisition was seen as a way to get that investment. Nimbus will initially be operated as an independent business unit; the existing UK-based core team will remain in the UK (alongside an existing UK-based TIBCO engineering unit that arrived when TIBCO bought Staffware).

TIBCO’s recent strategy has been to acquire outside its core of heritage middleware business in complementary areas; the Nimbus Partners acquisition is a good fit. If it can execute well and see Nimbus not only as a source of technology but also as a source of sales and customer engagement know-how, this acquisition could have an impact for TIBCO well beyond the probably pretty modest purchase price. Existing Nimbus customers get a more stable vendor with a global footprint and significant development and support resources; existing TIBCO customers get access to some interesting process improvement tools that can help drive successful business change. First, though, TIBCO has to execute well over the next 18-24 months; we’ll be watching with interest to see how well the cultures and capabilities of the two organisations learn from each other.

For an in-depth analysis of Nimbus and its Control platform, see our November 2009 report Nimbus: Filling process knowledge gaps with Nimbus Control.

Posted in BPM