Just before Christmas, TIBCO released its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results for 2011 (the intervening holiday is why I haven’t blogged about it until now).

While companies like Oracle struggle to deliver performance, TIBCO continues to march relentlessly on. And although it’s perhaps tempting (certainly in comparison to behemoths like Oracle) to paint TIBCO as a small player, its full-year revenue for 2011 was only a step away from the $1bn mark (at $920.2m). That’s 22% growth over 2010′s headline number: an impressive performance.

I mentioned back in early October that TIBCO has begun to extend its business way beyond that of its core enterprise middleware heritage, into new segments that are more line-of-business focused and which enable it to sell much more widely than its financial-services historical heartland. This seems to be continuing apace: a glance at the list of big customer wins sees a much more balanced list with significant contributions from telecoms, government, energy, manufacturing, life sciences and transport/logistics.

TIBCO’s tibbr enterprise social software platform was also called out explicitly in discussion of the results: it seems that this product – built in TIBCO’s labs rather than being acquired – is turning out to be one of the key levers that the company can use to get it into new conversations and relationships. TIBCO’s Spotfire analytics and visualisation technology is also responsible for a big chunk of the growth – as well as helping the company get into more and more deals outside of its historical industry base.

When it comes to BPM technology, ActiveMatrix BPM continues to grow but overall license sales here are a small contributor to TIBCO’s numbers. That’s also currently the case for Nimbus Partners’ business (acquired in August 2011). However BPM technology is actually core to many of TIBCO’s propositions – so over the coming year we’ll be looking for signs that this part of TIBCO’s portfolio is pulling its weight.

It’ll be really interesting to see where the company takes its business in 2012 as moves beyond the magic $1bn to the next step up in size. More acquisitions are on the horizon, I expect – both in core technology and also in industry-specific application and process areas. What do you think?

The week after Progress’ Revolution customer event in Boston, I spent a few days in Vegas courtesy of TIBCO at its annual TUCON customer shindig. At one level, there are some interesting parallels to draw between Progress and TIBCO*: both vendors are ‘independent’ infrastructure software providers; both are currently pitching visions of responsiveness to their markets (“Operational Responsiveness” and “The Two Second Advantage” respectively); and both have changed the direction of their businesses through strings of technology company acquisitions. However TIBCO is a fair bit ahead of Progress currently: it’s a larger company, and it’s also used its relatively larger size to enable it to pursue a larger series of acquisitions (as Tony Baer notes, 6 new companies got hitched to TIBCO in 2010 alone).

As with the Progress event the week previous, I didn’t expect to learn much new stuff about products and strategy (Sandy Kemsley has some thorough write-ups of the main sessions); the value for me was more in chatting to customers, prospects and partners in order to get a feel for how these groups perceive the company and where it’s headed. What appears to be the case – from what I heard at TUCON, at least – is that TIBCO is a company with an awful lot of opportunity in front of it; but that it’s also got some work to do to be able to address that opportunity most effectively.

What’s created the opportunity is what’s also behind a significant chunk of the 30%+ year-on-year license revenue growth that TIBCO is currently experiencing: its recent acquisitions. Looking forward, I see the more ‘application focused’ acquisitions it’s made – Loyalty Lab, Nimbus Partners, ForeSight, Netrics, Spotfire – as being absolutely crucial. Why? Because in many cases they enable TIBCO to expand its industry footprint; but at least as importantly, because they allow TIBCO to sell its capabilities to new kinds of buyer in customer organisations. The people who have historically bought Loyalty Lab, Nimbus and Spotfire products tend to be line-of-business executives; these are audiences that have historically been largely out of the scope of TIBCO’s sales and marketing efforts.

And let’s not forget tibbr: this is an internally-developed product that’s also breaking out as a line-of-business sale. Significant number of large enterprise customers have deployed tibbr in the past year (I don’t think I’m at liberty to say publicly how many) – and critically, for around half of this number tibbr is the first TIBCO product they’ve purchased. The people who are buying into tibbr aren’t architects or developers, either.

The real kick for TIBCO will come if and when it can get these ‘new’ purchasing groups to look beyond their initial products of interest, explore what else TIBCO has to offer, and then invest across TIBCO’s portfolio. But TIBCO can’t afford to promote or sell to this group in the way that it’s used to doing. The company will need to be ready with some answers to new customers’ questions that say more than “we offer market-leading innovation in core middleware domains” (which is what the company has spent 20 years saying to its core customer base).

Now it’s fair to say that TIBCO is making some strides here. For one, it’s busy building out a set of detailed solution frameworks – most notably in telecoms and financial services – that it hopes will showcase how its products address top-line business concerns across a set of industry scenarios. Secondly, it’s also committing to build and maintain specialised sales teams that focus exclusively on serving the more specialised customer groups around Spotfire, Nimbus, Loyalty Lab and others. It’s clear that in 2-3 years it wants the current situation (where the vast majority of sales are of horizontal infrastructure technologies) to flip, so that the vast majority of sales are instead solution-focused.

As I said, though, there’s more to do. Here are some questions that I’ll be looking for answers to, in no particular order: How effective will the specialised salesforces be in bringing the rest of TIBCO’s sales and field personnel to the table? How effective will TIBCO’s general technical sales force be in these situations? How do TIBCO’s recent ‘application focused’ acquisitions play into TIBCO’s overall “two-second advantage” vision? Can the company link these up to help it be as focused as possible?

But perhaps most importantly: does it really make sense to aim to be “the innovation leader in all our key segments“, as TIBCO itself asserted in an analyst session at the event? If you look at the places where TIBCO is seeing most growth and most likely to grow in the coming years, those areas which will drive the most growth aren’t necessarily dependent on market-leading technology innovation.

If TIBCO it’s serious about being more business-focused and using this to drive its growth going forward, then ‘the most innovative’ market spot is quite likely to be a red herring – at least for its core software infrastructure lines. Rather, it should focus on trying its best to bring advanced technologies to new markets through smart packaging and selling.

Now that’s something to aim for – but can TIBCO do it, particularly as it continues to sell the same technologies to IT audiences? It’s clear that the company is riding high and has a lot of energy and momentum… but it’s not always easy to change the way your company thinks when things are going well…

 [*There is another parallel between Progress and TIBCO: both companies had Train as the entertainment as their headline event entertainment provider of choice. Seems like those boys are busy with the corporate gigs!]

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 Ł10m 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.

TIBCO’s been through some tough times, but over the past year it’s started to really motor along. The acquisitions of Spotfire (analytics), Netrics (data matching), Data Synapse (grid and cloud computing infrastructure) have been significant engines of growth – helping to make TIBCO’s infrastructure portfolio much richer. The company has complemented these ‘horizontal’ acquisitions with others which are designed to help it penetrate industries outside its traditional base – examples include Loyalty Lab (loyalty management, principally for retailers), OpenSpirit (application and data integration, principally for energy companies), and Foresight (B2B integration, principally for the healthcare industry).

From a BPM technology perspective, the company has been through a complete redevelopment exercise. We’re just about to publish an in-depth assessment of the new ActiveMatrix BPM platform, and to summarise: it has a number of really strong elements, and it’s a great step forward from the previous offering (which mixed-and-matched elements from a variety of technology sources and eras).

With this in mind, I was interested to see what TIBCO’s business has been like and if there’s been any impact of the new BPM release yet. In its second quarter of 2011 (ended May 31), the top-level picture was very strong indeed:

• Revenue was up 25% year-on-year
• License revenue up 32% year-on-year
• Non-GAAP operating profit up 31% year-on-year.

TIBCO is now rapidly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue; and its acquisitions have helped it broaden its market footprint into healthcare, retail and other industries.

When you look at the BPM business – which, at the moment, also includes sales of tibbr (though revenues are likely to be small, there are around 20 customers live with it at the time of writing) – it’s notable, to me at least, how small the contribution is. Q2 BPM license revenue was 9% of the total $83m; that’s around $7.5m. TIBCO declares that this is up 33% year-on-year – which is a good sign – but I’m guessing that at the moment, the company hasn’t yet seen a return on its very significant redevelopment investment.

This means that right now, at least, from a BPM technology perspective TIBCO is at the same kind of scale as many of the modest-sized pure-play technology vendors out there. Given its business model and momentum I’d really expect it to start to pull away from that crowd; but with many pure-play BPM technology vendors growing 30% year-over-year it will need to accelerate its BPM business further in order to do that.

I’d expect TIBCO do start to try and work ActiveMatrix BPM into more integrated, multi-product deals over the coming quarters – and I hope it succeeds in continuing to grow the BPM business. ActiveMatrix BPM is nice technology that deserves to see some market traction.

On Monday, with the official launch of Tibbr, enterprise integration specialist TIBCO joined the crowded market for enterprise social software tools.

Although at first sight the launch of a social software platform by a vendor previously seen primarily as an IT infrastructure technology company might seem like an odd move: but as was pointed out to us by Stefan Farestam, TIBCO’s Director of Product Marketing in EMEA, TIBCO’s heritage is real-time publish-and-subscribe message delivery. For a couple of decades now TIBCO has used this core expertise to build high-performance messaging technology platforms that link IT applications with other applications; now it’s using this expertise to link groups of people, information sources and systems together. And this link is more than just marketing spin: Tibbr was initially built using TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix messaging middleware platform.

At a high level Tibbr looks not unlike a Facebook page – core to the user experience is an event stream that details items of interest. As hinted above, though, Tibbr – like Salesforce.com’s Chatter – isn’t just an environment where people send messages; information sources and systems of record can also post events for sharing. In addition to this, Tibbr users can also take action on events, launching tasks directly from within the Tibbr event stream.

As well as following individuals like in a traditional microblogging environment, Tibbr places a particular focus on the creation and following of ‘subjects’, which are groups focused on a particular interest topic or activity. Subjects are managed in a hierarchy; so, for example, you could set up a top-level subject ‘customers’ and then have individual topics below that for particular industries, particular strategic accounts, and so on. Anyone with sufficient rights can create subjects – subjects can be controlled such that only people with certain rights can create, post to, or subscribe to particular subjects.

Overall, Tibbr looks like a very competitive product, and will stand up well to the competition from a features and functions standpoint. The challenge for TIBCO will be how well it is able to differentiate itself in this very noisy market. While most of its competitors are targeting business users with their marketing and sales, TIBCO’s background is more in line with the IT department. It is aware of this of course, and one of its most important differentiators relates to its ‘IT-friendly’ positioning.  Greater openness, the option to deliver the solution on-premise, and TIBCO’s rock-solid enterprise IT reliability and security credentials will also appeal to IT. The challenge is whether organisations are mature enough in their understanding and adoption of these types of social technologies to recognise the need for a more strategic, IT-driven approach. However, this remains a very immature market, and most organisations are a long way from being ready to address social software in such a centralised, strategic way. For those organisations who are more mature in their adoption levels, TIBCO still faces the challenge of how quickly it can roll out pre-packaged integration connectors with a range of popular information stores, systems of record and other tools.

TIBCO’s market entry brings a new, welcome perspective to this market; it faces significant challenges in gaining profile among the many contenders both small and large, but with an effective marketing strategy and strong case studies it has the potential to compete effectively against the more established competition.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

This week we launched the latest in our series of MWD Insights events. This time we’re looking at Process Intelligence (PI). PI is something that’s been around as a concept for a while now, but we’ve found a lot of confusion out there still as to what its focus and scope actually is. Is it the next iteration of Business Activity Monitoring, or BAM? Some people think so, but we see things a little differently.

As we see it, PI is about ensuring that an entire company is aligned towards its stated performance objectives by linking business strategy to day-to-day business execution, more effectively and more efficiently. PI isn’t a product you can buy off the shelf – it’s an organisational capability that requires a blend of new and existing tools for measuring, monitoring and managing your business. Easy, right?! Not always. Critical? Yes, particularly if, like many organisations, your processes aren’t consistent, your employees aren’t responding to demand quickly and effectively,  you don’t have accurate data to hand to make evidence-based decisions, and as a result, your customers’ experience and consequently your overall business performance is suffering. If that sounds like your organisation, then this event is for you.

In this event you’ll find two keynote presentations by Neil Ward-Dutton, our BPM expert, and Helena Schwenk, our analytics and information management expert. The first one, Linking Strategy to Execution, looks at the overall topic of Process Intelligence – what it is, why it’s important, how it can help, how it differs from other BPM concepts, and what roles tools have to play in developing a PI capability. In the second presentation, Gaining and Maintaining Momentum, we dig deeper into the practical application of PI – how to get started, and once you have, how to reach full maturity by optimising your organisation’s approach to and use of PI. And we share what one UK health provider has been able to achieve so far.

We appreciate how busy you are – that’s why we’ve made these presentations available to you on-demand so you can listen to them at a time to suit you and dip in and out as necessary. Simply visit the event home page to get started. All we ask is that you sign in to your MWD account. If you don’t have one, you can create one free of charge quickly and easily. If you already have a LinkedIn account you can even use that to sign in in seconds.

We also know how tight budgets can be these days, so this knowledge and insight is brought to you free of charge thanks to the generous support of our sponsors: Progress Software, Software AG and TIBCO. Each sponsor has a ‘booth’ page in the event’s virtual exhibition hall where they outline their own approach to PI and the offerings they have. You’ll also find links there to a wealth of other resources including videos, whitepapers, a free book, and access to a special community group. We thank our sponsors for their support and for making these resources available via our event.

So get started now and check out the event site. As always, let us know what you think. Use the feedback link on the event page and you’ll receive 10% off our premium advisory reports.

Back in September I reported briefly on TIBCO’s third quarter results: in that quarter, it saw a strong year-on-year revenue rise of 23%. Today TIBCO announced that its fourth quarter matched its third in terms of year-on-year revenue growth with another 23% rise; overall for its 2010 financial year revenue was up 21%.

Earlier in December Robin Bloor at The Virtual Circle pointed out that as a company whose market cap has grown around 140% over the past year, TIBCO is currently one of the fastest-growing technology companies of significant size (that is, discounting startups which – if they’re attractive – typically grow in value very fast from a very small base). This annual result shows that the company is doing a good job of maintaining momentum.

Also in December, TIBCO announced its acquisition of Loyalty Lab – a provider of SaaS-based customer loyalty programme management tools. This is highly significant, I think. TIBCO has been on a bit of an acquisition streak in the past couple of years; but Loyalty Lab is different. Just as is the case with IBM, with its heritage in middleware infrastructure TIBCO is loathe to use the word ‘applications’ in describing its portfolio – but as they say: “if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…” The acquisition of Loyalty Lab builds on the expertise and technology of Spotfire and BusinessEvents, but it also takes TIBCO to a very different place on the software industry map that gives it a revenue-generating SaaS business, and much more exposure to line-of-business executives, particularly in retail and CPG – but that also exposes it to potential uncertainty or confusion in its partner base.

2011 looks like being a really interesting year for TIBCO.

Last week, infrastructure generalist vendors TIBCO and Progress Software, both of which sell BPM technology alongside complementary technology (event processing, ESB, data integration, analytics, and so on) announced their Q3 financial results.

TIBCO announced that it had achieved 23% growth year-on-year in both license revenue and overall; Progress announced that it had achieved 8% growth overall (but 14% from software licenses). For the year-to-date, TIBCO hit revenue of $512.8m; Progress hit revenue of $384m.

Interestingly, both companies share a figure: both companies source around 35% of their revenue from new license sales, with 65% coming from services and maintenance – both companies are mature. Also interestingly, both companies have been using similar campaigns to attempt to reinvigorate their fortunes, and engage customers in business conversations rather than deep-tech conversations (“my ESB’s faster than your ESB,” etc).

For TIBCO, it’s all about helping customers capitalise on a “two-second advantage“; for Progress it’s all about building companies that exhibit Operational Responsiveness. For both, it’s about tying together technology that helps organisations sense changes, opportunities and challenges quickly (event processing) with technology that can make sense of those events and drive the right response into the organisation or the market (BPM, integration technologies, and so on).

Both companies have played up the roles that their “responsiveness” technologies are playing in their growth. It’s certainly good to see veteran players like TIBCO and Progress rediscovering a bit of mojo; let’s see whether they can parlay this upward swing into longer-term growth plays. For me, the health of a handful of  “independent” infrastructure software players is a good sign for industry at large, because it maintains a level of industry choice that just wouldn’t be there if the market collapsed down to the usual behemoths.

At TIBCO’s TUCON user conference a couple of weeks back, CEO Vivek RanadivĂ© 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 RanadivĂ© 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.

Last week I was invited to speak as part of the London leg of TIBCO’s NOW roadshow, which focused primarily on Cloud computing and TIBCO’s new Silver offering (you can see what we think about that specifically in this report).

My job was to talk about “articulating the value of Cloud computing”. This was a fun challenge: so much of the talk about Cloud today starts by arm-waving at the 30,000ft level – and then zooms right down to the level of “virtualised compute resources” and “dynamic scalability”. What I hadn’t seen so much of was an attempt to map out more of a big picture of the value that Cloud computing can potentially deliver in the context of other approaches to consuming IT infrastructure resources.

So after reading countless blogs, conference proceedings, customer stories and news articles, I sat and stared at a blank piece of paper for a while, thinking about how I could pull all the different perspectives together to show one picture that captures all the different ways in which Cloud computing can potentially deliver value. This is what I ended up drawing and presenting in my talk:

You can see that there are seven elements of value I’ve highlighted, and they fall into three “value types”: economic, architectural and strategic.

• The economic value of Cloud is largely about being able to align the timing and size of the investments you make with the value you receive – variously referred to as “pay as you go”, “pay as you grow”. You don’t pay $millions for infrastructure that only delivers value months or years later; you pay for what you actually need, when (or soon after) you use it. And you don’t purchase an asset that then depreciates (like crazy).
• The architectural value of Cloud is about having an simple, consistent abstract environment presented to developers and operations folks that hides a lot of complexity, making it much quicker and easier to develop and deploy applications.
• The strategic value of Cloud might be easily conflated with the economic value, but I think it’s different. It’s this: Cloud platforms help you focus on what makes your organisation more effective and different, and leave all the other stuff to a third party that is dedicated to doing a great job for a competitive price. This is about focus and it’s also about avoiding having to train people to do things that fundamentally don’t add value to your organisation (think “Lean IT” if you like.)

Have I captured all the potential elements of Cloud computing value? I’m 90% sure I have – but if I’ve missed something please let me know! Either way, the discussions I’ve had around this picture so far make me think that it’s a useful model for exploring different Cloud propositions as stated today and comparing them. What do you think?

Next up: I’ll post another version of this picture that contrasts the value of “private” and “public” Cloud propositions. Both types of propositions have value – but it’s important to be clear about what that value actually looks like in each case.