Tibco takes on the ‘why do it’ aspect of digital transformation

The integration and analytics specialist uses its recent conference in Berlin to outline further steps along the road to a holistic, integrated analytics and management environment

As Tibco’s CEO Murray Rode said at the start of his keynote presentation at the recent Tibco NOW conference in Berlin, the road to digital transformation for most businesses is not about how much money is spent on the process of digitalisation, but about how it is spent – and why.

Though the technology is obviously of crucial importance still, it is no longer the key driving force.

As a simple example, he referenced a survey the company recently undertook, which showed that, in the banking sector alone, that those companies which had not yet set out on a digital transformation path suffered a negative impact on revenues of around 35%. Those that had set off down that road, on the other hand, had seen revenue gains of around 45% on average:

This pushed the company in an interesting direction for its obviously self-centred event, in that it wasn’t particularly self-centred at all. Rather than focussing on the wonders of its technology – and to be fair Tibco does have more than its fair share of that available – the focus of the main keynotes was directed more at the experiences of its users.

For example, Rode spoke of Melbourne airport which, perhaps surprisingly, now the fourth busiest airport in the world. It launched itself on a digital transformation journey that started out just looking at what happens during passenger journeys. The aim was to determine how to best use the resources at the airport to give passengers a good experience.

This led to the need to be more transparent and to give passengers as much information as possible,; which in turn has led to the interconnected monitoring and reporting of as many events within the airport as possible. The result, Rode suggested, i0s that Melbourne airport has turned itself into what is, in effect a small smart city.

Tibco now aims to provide customers with two things: the ability to create an environment of `interconnect everything’, together with augmented intelligence tools that together become what he called the connected intelligence cloud. That can then be delivered where, and in a form, that is appropriate to a customer’s needs, such as on premise, in the cloud, in a virtual private cloud, or in a hybrid cloud.

Several of the company’s customers were there to tell their stories and experiences themselves, with pride of place going to Matt Harris, the head of IT at Mercedes AMG Petronas, or as many might better know the company, Mercedes F1.

Mercedes recently formed a partnership with Tibco that is planned to run deeper into areas of in-depth decision making support than would expected from the type of relationship that often proliferates in F1, where money – and equipment is exchanged for the benefits of brand association. Here, the partnership is setting out to exploit Tibco’s technologies to provide decision support in both car technology health and efficiency, and in race strategy.

According to Harris, the key part of the Tibco relationship is set to be predictive work on decisions such as assessing critical car sub-systems for all-important will it/won’t it fail assessments. Here, the need is use machine learning and predictive analysis tools to remove the requirement to keep looking at all the data all the time; what he called getting rid of the data noise:

Much of this work will be conducted at the Mercedes factory, but it will also have a `front office’ that travels to every race. This will have the side benefit of testing the equipment and software in the pressure cooker environment that is an F1 pit.

This will involve a regular 36-hour set up, working perfectly from at least Friday morning to Sunday afternoon, followed by a rapid – 6 hour – breakdown and packing process that has to be complete correctly otherwise the next set-up will go wrong.