Analyst Perspectives

TIBCO is a large, independent cloud-computing and data analytics software company that offers integration, analytics, business intelligence and events processing software. It enables organizations to analyze streaming data in real time and provides the capability to automate analytics processes. It offers more than 200 connectors, more than 200 enterprise cloud computing and application adapters, and more than 30 non-relational structured query language databases, relational database management systems and data warehouses.

Earlier this year, TIBCO completed its acquisition of Information Builders, Inc., an analytics and business intelligence software company that was rated Exemplary in Ventana Research’s 2021 Value Index on Analytics and Data. With this acquisition, TIBCO expanded its data integration and analytics capabilities across its portfolio, incorporating a set of enterprise-class organizations. TIBCO has acquired more than 30 companies to build out its platform and product offerings, including its Spotfire purchase in 2007, StreamBase Systems in 2013, and Orchestra Networks in 2018, among others.

The company has a variety of analytic capabilities and products. TIBCO Spotfire enables ad hoc analyses, data exploration and dashboards. Spotfire’s user interface provides recommendations on visualizations to analyze data, and suggests possible relationships in the data, making it easier for individuals to extract insights from their data.

TIBCO Data Science offers a platform to author and deploy data science workflows and scripts. It includes tools for developing artificial intelligence and machine language analyses as well as tools for model management, model deployment and governance. The data science workflows can also be run from Spotfire to incorporate the results of AI/ML models into broader analytical activities.

TIBCO Streaming is the company’s product for streaming data and analytics. TIBCO ModelOps application is its cloud native model management and scoring environment that supports the deployment of ML pipelines, models, and data source and sinks, enabling data scientists and business workers to manage the life cycle and deployment of ML algorithms.

With this portfolio of products, TIBCO addresses a wide range of analytic requirements. Only a handful of vendors can provide such a broad set of capabilities. TIBCO has also assembled a portfolio of data integration capabilities that include bulk data movement, application integration, and events and messages. One part of the data integration portfolio is TIBCO Data Virtualization. No matter how hard you work to consolidate data into a central repository, there are often pieces of data that have to be combined from multiple data sources. We find that such issues are common and that many organizations are turning to data virtualization to address these needs. Our research shows that data virtualization is popular in the big data world. One-quarter (27%) of participants in our Data Lake Dynamic Insights research report they are currently using data virtualization, and another two-quarters (46%) plan to include data virtualization in the future. Even more interesting: Those who are using data virtualization report higher rates of satisfaction (79%) with their data lake than those who are not (36%).

TIBCO offers diverse data and analytics products. That is both its strength and its weakness. It has invested in integrating various products and acquisitions into its ecosystem to expand its capabilities, and has made significant progress. The company laid out a clear and compelling vision on where its heading at its 2021 TIBCO NOW event. While there has been good progress in integrating the various parts of its portfolio, there is still more work to be done. In addition, like many vendors transitioning from on-premises software to cloud-based offerings, there are some differences between what is available on-premises and in cloud versions.

Organizations need adaptable and flexible business processes to remain competitive in today’s market. I recommend that organizations seeking a broad set of data and analytic capabilities across multiple data sources — including real-time and predictive analytics — consider the offerings of TIBCO.

Regards,

David Menninger