Column 2

Kofax Altosoft For Operational Intelligence

Wayne Chambliss and Rich Rabin of Kofax Altosoft gave a presentation at Kofax Transform, most of which was a demo, on becoming an operational intelligence guru. This is my first real look at the Altosoft analytics product, acquired by Kofax about two years ago, since that’s not my main focus unless it’s particularly tied to process in some way.

Rabin used their graphical design tool to define the location of the metrics datamart, the data source (a variety of databases, or a file drop location), then define metrics by mapping the data fields, and applying aggregations and formatting. Although there is inherent complexity in understanding the use of the underlying data, the tool seems to make it pretty easy and fast to define the data and metrics, then load the data into the datamart and calculating the initial metrics. Once that was done, he created a graphical dashboard related to the defined metrics, and could preview and run it directly. No SQL, no coding. If you want to get more complex, there’s a full expression editor, but everything is still done graphically within the same tool. You can directly examine the underlying generated SQL if you really want to.

It’s also possible to create a record to use as a data source, which is a similar abstraction concept to a database view, but with the addition functionality of heterogeneous data sources, derived fields, mappings and even field renaming. This allows someone to create metrics and dashboards based on records, without having to understand the underlying data sources.

Lots of other functionality here, including setting user authentications and access rights, scheduled loading of data sources into the metrics mart, dynamic filtering on dashboards and pivoting charts, much of which is available directly to the end users on the dashboard.

He wrapped up with a very brief process intelligence demo, where it’s possible to specify metrics directly based on a Kofax document capture process.

Tablets And Digital Signatures At AIA Life

Just to maximize confusion, we have a second AIA at the Kofax Transform conference: this morning, Aia referred to the customer communications management company recently acquired by Kofax; this afternoon, AIA is the pan-Asian life insurance company, with their director of distribution platforms Steffen Schade talking about their experience with capturing digital signatures on an iPad for life insurance applications. Since they have a captive sales force, the iPad app is used by their advisors, not by the customers directly; it really becomes their sales kit, from financial needs analysis to quotation to application to written signature to payment. It appears that they were a Softpro (since acquired by Kofax) customer when their e-signature project started, but not otherwise using Kofax products.

Adoption has been great: they went from 1800 advisors in 4 countries using it in 2012, to 30k advisors in 11 countries by the end of 2014. Productivity has increased by 34% per advisor, allowing them to see more customers in a day while providing a better customer experience because of immediate access to information and faster turnaround, in addition to the efficiency gains in the back office for processing the applications. The project cycle was driven by the needs of the field sales force, and done on a per-country basis to allow adjustments to be made for regional variances as well as incorporating improvements discovered in previous deployments. Feedback from the advisors is very positive, and even technically unsophisticated customers have few problems using the advisor’s iPad to view and sign their applications.

Their next goal is a complete mobile office for advisors, providing more functionality such as lead management and productivity metrics; the only Kofax component is the e-signature, but this is a good example of using Kofax products as embedded components in an existing application rather than a complete solution. They need to have something to integrate the different components that they are already using in both the sales e-signature application and the more complete mobile office, but it’s not clear that they are looking at Kofax for that. Lots of interested questions from the audience about mobile capture, including mobile device management, limiting screen snapshots and more.

Kicking off KofaxTransform 2015: Day 1 Keynotes

I’m in Vegas for a couple of days for the Kofax Transform conference. Kofax has built their business beyond their original scanning and capture capabilities (although many customers still use them for just that): they have made a play in the past couple of years in the smart process application space to extend that “first mile” capability further into the customer journey, and recently acquired Aia, a customer communications management software company, to help round out their ability to support the entire cycle.

The morning keynote on the first day kicked off with introductions from Howard Dratler, EVP of Field Operations, then on to the CEO, Reynolds Bish, for a company update and vision. He’s been with Kofax since 2007, and led them through getting rid of their hardware business and building a more modern software organization including a number of acquisitions, and a public listing on NASDAQ. A key part of this was repositioning in the smart process application (SPA) area with their TotalAgility platform and the vertical solutions that they and their partners build on that. I suspect that there are still a lot of partners (and customers) with solutions built on the older technology; as other software vendors have found, it’s often difficult to get people to refactor onto a new platform when the old one is currently meeting their needs. Their core capture license revenue is still almost 60% of their revenue, but the new and acquired products have increased from zero in 2011 to over 40% They’ve increased their R&D spending significantly, as well as spending on acquisitions, and sales and marketing activities; given their strong cash position, they’ve been able to fund all of these expenditures using cash generated from operations. Overall, a good financial position and good repositioning from their traditional capture business to a broader part of their customers’ business processes, particularly in the systems of engagement.

Bish talked about the “first mile challenge” of getting from the systems of engagement to the systems of record, and how SPAs created with their TotalAgility platform can fill that gap, providing a range of capabilities including mobility, capture, transformation, collaboration, e-signature (via their recent acquisition of Softpro SignDoc) integration and analytics. Although they present TotalAgility primarily as a platform for partners and customers to build SPAs, they also offer vertical applications where they have experience: Kofax Mortgage Agility and Claims Agility. He went into more detail on how the Softpro SignDoc and Aia customer communications acquisitions provide new capabilities for handling signed digital communications with customers, allowing legally-binding transactions to be completed within applications built on TotalAgility: what he called digital transaction management. He also talked about their new mobile capture platform, available as an off-the-shelf capability as well as an SDK for embedding withing other mobile apps.

They’re really pushing to shift people onto the new TotalAgility platform, offering some good deals for customers to switch their KC/KTM licenses for TotalAgility licenses at a reasonable price point, but the effort required to refactor existing applications will still likely impede these migration efforts. There is no doubt that TotalAgility is a superior platform that offers new functionality, better flexibility, and faster development and deployment: the issue is that many customers find their current KC/KTM functionality to be adequate, and moving onto the new platform is a sufficiently large development project that they may consider looking at competitive solutions. I see this same challenge with other vendors, and it’s going to be a lot slower and less successful than Kofax likely imagines.

He summed up by stating that their short-term growth strategy is incremental rather than transformative. There’s also some sessions later today for the analysts to meet with Bish, so I’ll likely be able to expand on this further in later posts.

Next up was Guy Kawasaki, currently at Canva but well-known for his past gigs as an Apple evangelist and his other high-profile engagement gigs. His presentation was on customer enchantment: like engagement, but better. He laid out 10 rules for enchanting customers:

Achieve likability, by being genuine, accepting and positive
Achieve trustworthiness, by trusting others
Perfect your product, because it is easier to engage people with good stuff than with crap
Launch your product, by telling a story containing salient points, and planting the seeds of that story with many social channels
Overcome resistance, using social proof or data to change people’s minds, and understanding who the true influencers are
Endure, by enabling dedicated supporters and building an ecosystem
Present, and become a great presenter by customizing the introduction to the audience, selling the dream of how your product changes people’s lives, and using the 10 slides/20 minutes/30 point font rule
Use technology, removing the speed bumps to engagement and providing value in the form of information, insights and assistance
Enchant up (that is, enchant the boss), by dropping everything else, prototyping fast and delivering bad news early
Enchant down (that is, the people who work for you), by providing mastery and autonomy towards a higher purpose, and being willing to do the dirty jobs

He wrapped up with the three pillars of enchantment: be likable, trustworthy and competent. Great words to live by.

Kawasaki’s a very engaging and funny speaker, with some funny cracks at Apple and Microsoft alike, and good examples from a number of industries. Great talk.

There’s an analysts session for the rest of the morning, looking forward to hearing more about Kofax’s plans for the future.

Capital Raising Through Crowdfunding

Nicholas Doyle of DST gave a presentation on crowdfunding: an interesting topic to cover at a conference attended primarily by old-school financial services companies, who are the ones most likely to be radically disrupted by crowdfunding, but likely don’t see it coming. He started with a video from CraftFund — crowdsourced capital investment focused on the craft beer and food industry — then talked about the state of the market, the different business models, and the US securities regulations that apply to private securities that include crowdfunding. He also included a good timeline of crowdfunding from the 1983 startup of Grameen Bank‘s microfinancing operations, plus some of the regulations that govern microlending and microequity in the US:

I covered a bit about crowdfunding at the 2012 Technicity event, including the UK crowdfunding platform CrowdCube and a discussion on the legality of equity crowdfunding in Ontario (where I live). Equity crowdfunding really only started in the US in 2011 with MicroVentures, and the recently passed JOBS Act includes a number of regulations that apply to crowdfunding and other small-scale equity investments, including who can participate and how it can be promoted and sold. In particular, Title III of the JOBS Act applies to crowdfunding; it’s not finalized yet but Doyle was able to give us a review of what is expected there, as well as some of the state regulations that will impact crowdfunding.

The landscape positions the crowdfunding platforms between issuers and investors; that platform needs to include compliance, distribution, reporting and enabling technologies. Crowdfunding is only 0.6% of the world’s capital markets, but that’s still $1.6B and the industry has grown 1000% in the last five years, and will undoubtedly continue to grow. Debt financing is growing at a much higher rate than equity investing, in part due to the limits placed by the applicable titles of the JOBS Act. Donation models are also growing, and the biggest growth is in reward models, which are typical on sites such as Kickstarter. There are obvious challenges to work out with crowdfunding, such as secondary market liquidity and investor accreditation, but it’s safe to say that it’s here to stay and will continue to grow.

DST does not currently offer any products in this area, but it’s interesting to see that they are keeping a close eye on it to see how they can fit in the market, whether as a recordkeeper, clearinghouse or other role.

The sun is high and I’m all done with my presentation and videography commitments, so this will be the end of my blogging from DST ADVANCE 2015 as I head out to enjoy a bit of the Phoenix weather.

Innovations In AWD User Experience

To finish off the first morning at DST ADVANCE 2015, I attended the session on customer and work experience, which was presented as a case study of background investigations on a security-sensitive hiring process, such as for a government immigration and border control agency. This is a relatively straightforward case management scenario: create a case, uploading and indexing the initiating documents using a form; then case management from a case worker’s viewpoint, including tasks assigned to them or other people on the team, and an activity stream view of all case activity. They demonstrated a number of the new widget capabilities, including grid views of case tasks and investigation team members, and Google Maps integration with case data overlaid on the map. We also saw a field investigator’s portal view that limits the view to that user’s active case progress and the details of their assignments. The data entry forms regarding the person being investigated are reused from other parts of the process, plus forms specific to the investigator such as travel expenses.

This shows quite different interfaces depending on the user persona: the simple forms-based view for the case initiator; the full case management interface for the knowledge worker; a worklist-oriented case portal view for the field investigator; and a traditional internal worklist view for internal workers who are assigned specific tasks without visibility onto the entire case.

We didn’t see anything on how these interfaces are built, although there was some discussion of that; I think that there’s a more technical session on building interfaces using the widgets tomorrow.

Unfortunately, this session was in conflict with the Solutions for Tomorrow’s Workforce presentation about goal-driven design and some of the customer research that they’ve done; difficult to get to all of the sessions of interest here.

Event Analytics in Oil and Gas at TIBCONOW

Michael O’Connell, TIBCO’s chief data scientist, and Hayden Schultz, a TIBCO architect, discussed and demonstrated an event-handling example using remote sensor data with Spotfire and Streambase. One oil company may have thousands of submersible pumps moving oil up from well, and these modern pumps include sensors and telemetry to allow them to be monitored and controlled remotely. One of their oil and gas customers said that through active monitoring and control such as this, they are avoiding downtime worth $1000/day/well, meaning an additional $100M in additional revenue each year. In addition to production monitoring, they can also use remote monitoring in drilling operations to detect conditions that might be a physical risk. They use standards for sensor data format, and a variety of data sources including SAP HANA.

For the production monitoring, the submersible pumps emit a lot of data about their current state: monitoring for changes to temperature, pressure and current shows patterns that can be correlated with specific pre-failure conditions. By developing models of these pre-failure patterns using Spotfire’s data discovery capabilities on historical failure data, data pushed into Streambase can be monitored for the patterns, then Spotfire used to trigger a notification and allow visualization and analytics by someone monitoring the pumps.

We saw a demonstration of how the pre-failure patterns are modeled in Spotfire, then how the rules are implemented in Streambase for real-time monitoring and response using visual modeling and some XML snippets generated by Spotfire. We saw the result in Streambase LiveView, which provides visualization of streaming data and highlights those data points that are exhibiting the pre-failure condition. The engineers monitoring the pumps can change some of the configuration of the failure conditions, allowing them to fine-tune to reduce false positives without missing actual failure events. Events can kick off notification emails, generate Spotfire root cause analysis reports, or invoke other applications such as instantiating a BPM process.

There are a number of similar industrial applications, such as in mining: wherever there are a large number of remote devices that require monitoring and control.

TIBCONOW 2014 Day 2 Keynote: Product Direction

Yesterday’s keynote was less about TIBCO products and customers, and more about discussions with industry thought leaders about disruptive innovation. This morning’s keynote continued that theme with a pre-recorded interview with Vivek Ranadive and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talking about cloud, mobile, big data and the transformational effects on individual and business productivity. Nadella took this as an opportunity to plug Microsoft products such as Office 365, Cortana and Azure; eventually he moved on to talk about the role of leadership in providing a meaningful environment for people to work and thrive. Through the use of Microsoft products, of course.

Thankfully, we then moved on to actual TIBCO products.

We had a live demo of TIBCO Engage, their real-time customer engagement marketing product, showing how a store can recognize a customer and create a context-sensitive offer that can be immediately consumed via their mobile app. From the marketer’s side, they can define and monitor engagement flows — almost like mini-campaigns, such as social sharing in exchange for points, or enrolling in their VIP program — that are defined by their target, trigger and response. The target audience can be filtered by past interests or demographics; triggers can be a combination of geolocation (via their app), social media interactions, shopping cart contents and time of day; and responses may be an award such as loyalty points or a discount coupon, a message or both, with a follow link customized to the customer. A date range can then be set for each engagement flow, and set to be live/scheduled to start, or in a draft or review mode. Analytics are gathered as the flows execute, and the effectiveness can be measured in real time.

Matt Quinn, TIBCO’s CTO, spoke about the challenges of fast data: volume, speed and complexity. We saw the three blocks of the TIBCO Fast Data platform — analytics, event processing, and integration — in a bit more detail, with him describing how these three layers work together. Their strategy for the past 12 months, and going forward, has three prongs: evolution of the Fast Data platform; improved ease of use; and delivery of the Fast Data platform including cloud and mobile support. The Fast Data platform appears to be a rebranding of their large portfolio of products as if it were a single integrated product; that’s a bit of marketing-speak, although they do appear to be doing a better job of providing integrations and use cases of how the different products within the platform can be combined.

In the first part of the strategy, evolution of the platform (that is, product enhancements and new releases), they continue to make improvements to their messaging infrastructure. Fast, secure message transactions are where they started, and they continue to do this really well, in software and on their FTL appliances. Their ActiveSpaces in-memory data grid has improved monitoring and management, as well as multi-site replication, and is now more easily consumed via Node.js and other lighter-weight development protocols. BusinessWorks 6, their integration IDE, now provides more integrated development tooling with greatly improved user interfaces to more easily create and deploy integration applications. They’ve provided plug-ins for SaaS integrations such as Salesforce, and made it easier to create your own plug-ins for integration sources that they don’t yet support directly. On the event processing side, they’ve brought together some related products to more easily combine stream processing, rules and live data marts for real-time aggregation and visualization. And to serve the internet of things (IoT), they are providing connectivity to devices and sensors.

User experience is a big challenge with any enterprise software company, especially one that grows through acquisition: in general, user interfaces end up as a hodge-podge of inconsistent interfaces. TIBCO is certainly making some headway at refactoring these into a more consistent and easier to use suite of interfaces. They’ve improved the tooling in the BusinessWorks IDE, but also in the administration and management of integrations during development, deployment and runtime. They’ve provided a graphical UI designer for master data management (MDM). Presented as part of the ease of use initiative, he discussed the case management functions added to AMX BPM, including manual and automatic ad hoc tasks, case folder and documents with CMIS/ECMS access, and support for elastic organization structures (branch model). BPM reporting has also been improved through the integration of Jaspersoft (acquired by TIBCO earlier this year) with out of the box and customizable reports, and Jaspersoft also has been enhanced to more easily embed analytics in any application. They still need to do some work on interoperability between Jaspersoft and Spotfire: having two analytics platforms is not good for the customers who can’t figure out when to use which, and how to move between them.

The third prong of the strategy, delivery of the platform, is being addressed by offering on-premise, cloud, Silver Fabric platform-as-a-service, TIBCO Cloud Bus for hybrid cloud/on premise configurations, consumable apps and more; it’s not clear that you can get everything on every delivery platform, and I suspect that customers will have challenges here as TIBCO continues to build out their capabilities. In the near future, they will launch Simplr for non-technical integration (similar to IFTTT), and Expresso for consuming APIs. They are also releasing TIBCO Clarity for cleansing cloud data, providing cleaner input for these situational consumable apps. For TIBCO Engage, which we saw demonstrated earlier, they will be adding next best engagement optimization and support for third-party mobile wallets, which should improve the hit rate on their customer engagement flows.

He discussed some of the trends that they are seeing impacting business, and which they have on the drawing board for TIBCO products: socialization and gamification of everything; cloud requirements becoming hybrid to combine public cloud, private cloud and on premise; the rise of micro-services from a wide variety of sources that can be combined into apps; and HTML5/web-based developer tooling rather than the heavier Eclipse environments. They are working on Project Athena, a triplestore database that includes context to allow for faster decisioning; this will start to show up in some of the future product development.

Good review of the last year of product development and what to expect in the next year.

The keynote finished with Raj Verma, EVP of sales, presenting “trailblazer” awards to their customers that are using TIBCO technologies as part of their transformative innovation: Softrek for their ClearView CRM that embeds Jaspersoft; General Mills for their internal use of Spotfire for product and brand management; jetBlue for their use of TIBCO integration and eventing for operations and customer-facing services; and Three (UK telecom) for their use of TIBCO integration and eventing for customer engagement.

Thankfully shorter than yesterday’s 3-hour marathon keynote, and lots of good product updates.

Spotfire Content Analytics At TIBCONOW

(This session was from late yesterday afternoon, but I didn’t remember to post until this morning. Oops.)

Update: the speakers were Thomas Blomberg from TIBCO and Rik Tamm-Daniels from Attivio. Thanks, guys!

I went to the last breakout on Monday to look at the new Spotfire Content Analytics, which combines Spotfire in-memory analytics and visualization with Attivio content analysis and extraction. This is something that the ECM vendors (e.g., IBM FileNet) have been offering for a while, and I was interested to see the Spotfire take on it.

Basically, content analytics is about analyzing documents, emails, blogs, press releases, website content and other human-created textual data (also known as unstructured content) in order to find insights; these days, a primary use case is to determine sentiment in social media and other public data, in order for a company to get ahead of any potential PR disasters.

Spotfire Content Analytics — or rather, the Attivio engine that powers the extraction — uses four techniques to find relative information in unstructured content:

Text extraction, including metadata
Key phrase analysis, using linguistics to find “interesting” phrases
Entity extraction, identifying people, companies, places, products, etc.
Sentiment analysis, to determine degree of negative/positive sentiment and confidence in that score

Once the piece of content has been analyzed to extract this relevant information, more traditional analytics can be applied to detect patterns, tie these back to revenue, and allow for handling of potential high-value or high-risk situations.

Spotfire Content Analytics (via their ) uses machine learning that allows you to train the system using sample data, since the information that is considered relevant is highly dependent on the specific content type (e.g., a tweet versus a product review). They provide rich text analytics, seamless visualization via Spotfire, agility through combining sources and transformations, and support for diverse content sources. They showed a demo based on a news feed by country from the CIA factbook site (I think), analyzing and showing aggregate sentiment about countries: as you can imagine, countries experiencing war and plague right now aren’t viewed very positively. Visualization using Spotfire allows for some nice geographic map-based searching, as well as text searching. The product will be available later this month (November 2014).

Great visualizations, as you would expect from Spotfire; it will be interesting to see how this measures up to IBM’s and other content analytics offerings once it’s released.

TIBCONOW 2014 Opening Keynote: @Gladwell and More. Much More.

San Francisco! Finally, a large vendor figured out that they really can do a 2,500-person conference here rather than Las Vegas, it just means that attendees are spread out in a number of local hotels rather than in one monster location. Feels like home.

It seems impossible that I haven’t blogged about TIBCO in so long: I know that I was at last year’s conference but was a speaker (as I am this year) so may have been distracted by that. Also, they somehow missed giving me a briefing about the upcoming ActiveMatrix BPM release, which was supposed to be relatively minor but ended up bit bigger — I’ll be at the breakout session on that later today.

We started the first day with a marathon keynote, with TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadive welcoming San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, for a brief address about how technology is fueling San Francisco’s growth and employment, as well as helping the city government to run more effectively. The city actually have a chief data officer responsible for their open data intiatives.

Ranadive addressed the private equity buy-out of TIBCO head-on: 15 years ago, they took the company public, and by the end of this year, they will be a private company again. I think that this is a good thing, since it removes them from the pressures of quarterly public filings, which artificially impacts product announcements and sales. It allows them to make any necessary organization restructuring or divestiture without being punished on the stock market. Also, way better than being absorbed by one of the bigger tech companies, where the product lines would have be to realigned with incumbent technologies. He talked about key changes in the past years: the explosion of data; the rise of mobility; the emergence of social platforms; Asian economies; and how math is trumping science by making the “how” more important than the “why”. Wicked problems, but some wicked solutions, too. He claims that every industry will have an “Uberization”: controversies aside, companies such as Uber and AirBnB are letting service businesses flourish on a small scale using technology and social networks.

We then heard from Malcolm Gladwell — he featured Ranadive in one of his books — on technology-driven transformation, and the kinds of attitudes that make this possible. He told the story of Malcolm McLean, who created the first feasible intermodal containerized shipping in the 1950s because of his frustration with how long it took to unload his truck fleet at seaports, and how that innovation transformed the physical goods economy. In order to do this, McLean had to overcome the popular opinion that containerized shipping would fail (based on earlier failed attempts by others): as Gladwell put it, he had the three necessary characteristics of successful entrepreneurs: he was open/imaginative with creative ideas; he was conscientious and had the discipline to bring ideas to fruition including a transformation of the supply chain and sales model; and he was “disagreeable”, that is, had the resolve to pursue an idea in the face of his peers’ disapproval and ridicule. Every transformative innovation must be driven by someone with these three traits, who has the imagination to reframe the incumbent business to address unmet needs, and kill the sacred cows. Great talk.

Ranadive then invited Marc Andreessen on stage for a conversation (Andreessen thanked him for letting him “follow Malcolm freaking Gladwell on the stage”) about innovation, which Andreessen says is currently driven by mobile devices: businesses now must assume that every customer is connected 24×7 with a mobile device. This provides incredible opportunities — allowing customers to order products/services on the go — but also threats for businesses behind the curve, who will see customers comparing them to their competitors in real-time before making a purchasing decision. They discussed the future of work; Andreessen sees this as leveraging small teams, but that things need to change to make that successful, including incentives (a particular interest of mine, since I’ve been looking at incentives for collaboration amongst knowledge workers). Diversity is becoming a competitive advantage since it draws talent from a larger pool. He talked about the success rates of typical venture-funded companies, such as those that they fund: of 4,000 companies, about 15 will make it to being big companies, that is, with a revenue of $100M or more that would position them to go public; most of their profits as a VC come from those 15 companies. They fund good ideas that look like terrible ideas, because if everyone thought that these were great ideas, the big companies would already be doing them; the trick is filtering out all of ideas that look terrible because they actually are. More important is the team: a bad team can ruin a good idea, but a great team with a bad idea can find their way to a good idea.

Next up was TIBCO’s CTO Matt Quinn talking with Box CEO Aaron Levie: Box has been innovating in the enterprise by taking the consumer cloud storage that we were accustomed to, and bringing it into the enterprise space. This not only enables internal innovation because of the drastically lower cost and simpler user experience than enterprise content solutions such as SharePoint, but also has the ability to transform the interface between businesses and their customers. Removing storage constraints is critical to supporting that explosion of data that Ranadive talked about earlier, enabling the internet of everything.

We saw a pre-recorded interview that Ranadive did with PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi: she discussed the requirement to perform while transforming, and the increase in transparency (and loss of privacy) as companies seek to engage with customers. She characterized a leader’s role as that of not just envisioning the future, but making that vision visible and attainable.

Mitch Barns, CEO of Nielsen (the company that measures and analyzes what people watch on TV), talked about how their business of measurement has changed as people went from watching broadcast TV at times determined by the broadcasters, to time-shifting with DVRs and consuming TV content on mobile devices on demand. They have had to shift their methods and business to accommodate this change in viewing models, and deal with a flood of data about how, when and where that consumption is occurring.

I have to confess, by this point, 2.5 hours into the keynote without a break, my attention span was not what it could have been. Or maybe these later speakers just didn’t inspire me as much as Gladwell and Andreessen.

Martin Taylor from Vista Equity Partners, the soon-to-be owners of TIBCO, spoke next about what they do and their vision for TIBCO. Taylor was at Microsoft for 14 years before joining Vista, and helps to support their focus on applying their best practices and operating platform to technology companies that they acquire. Since their start in 2000, they have spent over $14B on 140 transactions in enterprise software. He showed some of their companies; since most of these are vertical industry solutions, TIBCO is the only name on that slide that I recognized. They attempt to foster collaboration between their portfolio companies: not just sharing best practices, but doing business together where possible; I assume that this could be very good for TIBCO as a horizontal platform provider that could leveraged by their sibling companies. The technology best practices that they apply to their companies include improved product management roadmaps that address the needs of their customers, and improved R&D practices to speed product release cycles and improve quality. They’re still working through the paperwork and regulatory issues, but are starting to work with the TIBCO internal teams to ensure a smooth transition. It doesn’t sound as if there will be any big technology leadership changes, but a continued drive into new technologies including cloud, IoT, big data and more.

Murray Rode, TIBCO’s COO, finished up the keynote talking about their Fast Data positioning: organizations are collecting a massive volume of data, but that data has a definite shelf life and degrades in value over time. In order to take advantage of short-lived opportunities where timing is everything, you have to be able to analyze and take actions on that data quickly. As he put it, big data lets you understand what’s already happened, but fast data lets you influence what’s about to happen. To do this, you need to combine analytics to define situations of interest and decisions; event processing to understand and act on real-time information; and integration (including BPM) to unify your transactional and big data sources. Rode outlined the four themes of their positioning: expanded reach, ease of consumption, compelling user journey, and faster time to value; I expect that we will see more along these themes throughout the conference.

All in all, a great keynote, even though it stretched to an ass-numbing three hours.

Disclosure: TIBCO is paying my expenses to be at TIBCO NOW and a speaking fee for me to be on a panel tomorrow. What I write here is my own opinion, and I am not compensated in any way for blogging.

SAP’s Bigger Picture: The AppDev Play

Although I attended some sessions related to BPM and operational process intelligence, last week’s trip to SAP TechEd && d-code 2014 gave me a bit more breathing room to look at the bigger picture — and aspirations — of SAP and their business technology offerings.

I started coming to SAPPHIRE and TechEd when SAP released a BPM product, which means that my area of interest was a tiny part of their primary focus on ERP, financials and related software solutions; most of the attendees (including the analysts and bloggers) at that time were more concerned with licensing models for their Business Suite software than new technology platforms. Fast forwarding, SAP is retooling their core software applications using HANA as an in-memory platform (cloud or on-premise) and SAP UI5/Fiori for user experience, but there’s something much bigger than that afoot: SAP is making a significant development platform play using those same technologies that are working so well for their own application refactoring. In other words, you can consider SAP’s software applications groups to be software developers who use SAP platforms and tools, but those tools are also available to external developers who are building applications completely unrelated to SAP applications.

They have some strong components: in-memory database, analytics, cloud, UI frameworks; they are also starting to push down more functionality into HANA such as some rudimentary rules and process functionality that can be leveraged by a development team that doesn’t want to add a full-fledged BRM or BPM system.

This is definitely a shift for SAP over the past few years, and one that likely most of their customers are unaware; the question becomes whether their application development tools are sufficiently compelling for independent software development shops to take a look.

Disclaimer: SAP paid my travel expenses to be at TechEd last week. I was not compensated for my time in any way, including writing, and the opinions here are my own.