Tibco moves to future-proof its customers, and itself

'Customers complained to me that we were a little bit too blackbox', says COO Matt Quinn

Tibco has always urged its customers to be agile, to stay one step ahead. With themes such as the 'two second advantage' and 'fast data', the company, which made its name in the 1990s with its high-speed enterprise bus software for real-time trading, has promoted the idea that harnessing data and interconnectivity can enable organisations to navigate successfully the fast-changing world around them. It was somewhat ironic, therefore, that the company found itself struggling to reverse out of the one-platform cul-de-sac it had artfully built, with a seemingly wilful myopia towards the cloud and open source companies now operating on its turf.

Amazingly, just as developers were enthusiastically taking up Docker, Kafka, Hadoop and Spark, Tibco executives were still publicly dismissing open source software as inherently untrustworthy and amateurish. A certain defensiveness has characterised the company's response when we have asked about his about this previously, but this week COO Matt Quinn offered a candid explanation. Reversing the Tibco juggernaut has just not been an easy thing to do, he said.

"There were a few things that were happening at the time," said Quinn. "What really happened is a bunch of customers complained to me that we were a little bit too 'blackbox', a bit too proprietary, and that the world was starting to move on.

"But Tibco really had a growth spurt around 2010 when a lot of people were looking for that kind of one-stop shop, one click deploy, everything in one box, that kind of all-encompassing platform. But roll through to 2015, 2016 and people were looking for the opposite, they were looking openness, open APIs and the rest.

"The engineers simply couldn't keep up with the demand for extensions and improvements to the products. So take the example of visualisations, every week, we'd have somebody come to us and say, 'look, I'd really like to build graphics in this way', or 'I really want to see a graph that looks like this', and all these requests were hitting the engineers, and yet we still wanted to make fundamental improvements to the core products."

This was shortly after the company went private, having being bought by Vista Equity Partners While core Tibco products remain proprietary it has been steadily adopting open standards through purchases such as the Mashery API platform, support for Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar as part of its messaging service, the Project Flogo open source ecosystem for building event-driven apps and support for Docker, Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem.

A related driver for this change is the increasing power of developers, said Quinn.

"Look, we were a company that really appealed to CIOs, to chief architects, but we'd never really been a company that appealed to developers, and developers consume technology in a vastly different way than, say, an architect does. One of the vehicles, frankly, is open source. We felt that the only way to really kickstart that strategy would be to take one of our flagship pillars, the integration pillar, and create something that was open source that we thought would be useful to developers and to integration engineers. And it really has kind of snowballed from there. Flogo has gone from strength to strength, which is great to see. But then we've also done a lot of work with Kafka and most recently with Pulsar."

The strategy is manifesting itself in the latest announcements at the Tibco Now event this week, which include the Any Data Hub, a data management blueprint that embraces distributed data environments, and Data Virtualisation 8.3 which includes connectors to more than 300 data sources including support for streaming sources such as Apache Kafka, OSIsoft and OPC Unified Architecture. There's also more support for multi-cloud and edge environments on offer.

CEO Dan Streetman said these changes are designed for sustainable innovation, and that applies to Tibco too.

"We have spent the last five years increasing our investment in research and development, increasing our focus on customer excellence and engaging with customers, and that's created a virtuous cycle for us. We're really excited about where we are technically now, with Kafka and Flogo and cloud native. We've got AI at the core of what we're doing, and most importantly we're engaging more fully with our customers. So I think all those things come together to future-proof Tibco the same way we've helped others future-proof themselves."