Ram Menon, EVP of Marketing and Product Strategy, discussed the go to market strategy for some of the opportunities that Murray Rode identified earlier.
One opportunity for growth is in simplification, in four major areas:
- Improved focus on who they are targeting in the sales process, based on their experience of who is most likely to buy and through deepening their penetration within existing customers.
- Creation of horizontal bundles that simplify purchasing for IT buyers: SOA starter edition, SOA composite apps, SOA integration, and SOA governance.
- Focus on differentiated vertical value propositions that allow a business buyer to match TIBCO’s capabilities to their specific business needs.
- Improved user interface and usability in the form of TIBCO ONE for deployment and management, all based on a common Eclipse framework and some of the technology that they acquired with General Interface.
They have a three core SOA messages to the market:
- Best in class ESB
- SOA service management
- Extreme messaging, namely top performance
They also have some BPM-related themes:
- Advanced order fulfillment (vertical)
- Dynamic claims management (vertical)
- Unify BPM and SOA: cross-selling BPM to existing SOA customers
There were two business optimization themes, including a supply chain management vertical, but that went by too fast for me.
Bruce Silver and another analyst later asked about the vertical solutions, and it appears that this is more about marketing and advertising than any verticalization of a product or service offering.
Menon discussed some of the specifics of their expansion into new geographies — including up-to-date localized product materials and websites — and new partner models.
They’ve made a big push for visibility in the market over the last two years, including such efforts as Greg the Architect videos on YouTube, resulting in a much greater chance of TIBCO’s name appearing whenever equivalent IBM and Oracle products are mentioned. They’re also launching TIBCOmmunity, a social network for their customers, although the site’s not up yet so there’s no details on what it will include.
He was followed by two of the VPs of Sales — Robin Gilthorpe for the Americas and Tony Harris for Asia-Pacific — and EVP of Sales Murat Sonmez standing in for the VP for EMEA, each discussing the specifics of their region.
A question came up at the end asking about who they’re selling to within organizations, and (not surprisingly) almost all SOA sales are to IT, whereas BPM is sometimes being sold to business management. TIBCO has a legacy of selling to IT, and I suspect that much of the sales force is most comfortable making the technical sale. Selling to business takes a slightly different set of skills, which makes me curious if they’re specifically recruiting business-oriented salespeople in their current sales force expansion.