Tag: tucon2012

Unified TIBCO BPM Strategy

Jay Lillie and Rachel Brennan, product managers for Nimbus Control and AMX BPM respectively, presented in the final session at TUCON 2012, discussing a unified BPM strategy that covers both methodologies and technologies. While AMX BPM is about the enterprise-strength (and mostly structured) business process automation technology, Nimbus Control is about documenting processes and procedures. Nimbus uses a notation called UPM, which is somewhat simpler than BPMN for viewing procedural documentation rather than process automation. A single box in UPN, plus its connectors, covers the when, what, why and who; it also allows for hierarchical representation of each of these boxes, so that departments may be represented at the highest level, whereas specific procedures are represented at lower levels. Nimbus Control’s sweet spot is as an “intelligent operations manual”, providing an online reference and guidance for workers who are doing manual processes.

The point of this presentation, though, was to look at the best practices methodology that they are developing for a BPM development project, and represent that methodology in a Nimbus model. A bit meta, but whatever works. That includes five strategies:

  • Get a big picture first, starting bigger than you think that you need and gathering a wide variety of information and requirements, then using constraints to work inwards and narrow the scope. That way, you are more likely to solve the real problem, not your original perception of what the problem is. I saw a great example of this when someone came up after my session this morning and said that he really wants to use some of these new technologies, but that he works in (essentially) product development and not directly with the  customers – hopefully, I helped him to think about how their entire end-to-end business, from inputs and product development through to sales and customer support, with its feedback to product development, is one big process: start with that, then narrow down the scope of implementation, rather than siloing up front.
  • Link constraints, requirements and process, which allows you to scope the solution and get agreement on the high-level goals between business and IT.
  • Consider metrics earlier rather than later, but don’t confuse metrics with requirements. This allows you to build in the ability to measure and act on the things that matter for your business performance.
  • Plan a workshop specific to your solution. Involve the right subject matter experts at the right time, and don’t waste their time by lumping together large groups to discuss widely varying topics that may only be of interest to a few people in the room at any given time.
  • Build user-facing test cases immediately, with test plans that work for both business and IT, and include signoff mechanisms. Scenarios must be tied to underlying processes, so that any changes to the processes will trigger the need to review the test plan.

They’re still working on this TIBCO Implementation Methodology (TIM), and it’s not just about BPM because they’re a stack vendor: although it’s starting with BPM and using a lot of the business-focused Nimbus methodology, it’s expanding out to include other products in the TIBCO portfolio.

I’m going to duck into the BPM engineering roundtable to finish off my time here at TUCON, so this is likely the end of my coverage from here this time since that may be under NDA.

Disclosure: TIBCO paid for my airfare and hotel costs to attend TUCON, and kicked in a speaking fee when they asked me to make a presentation on short notice. Rachel also promised me a Furla handbag, but I think that she was kidding.

TIBCO BPM Product Update and Strategy

The TUCON 2012 keynotes are done, and all of my analyst meetings have finished, so I’m free to attend some of the breakout sessions. This afternoon, I went to the BPM update with Roger King (director of BPM product strategy) and Justin Brunt (BPM product manager).

The current AMX BPM release is 1.3.1, with 2.0.0 coming in November, bringing a number of enhancements:

  • Some impressive performance statistics within a single engine: 20,000 simultaneous users opening and completing work items, and management of 1.6M process instances and 18.8m activities in a 10-hour working day.
  • Better administrative tools for managing halted process instances, including being able to examine the instance payload.
  • Worklist views can now be server-based, so that a filtered view of a work list is passed to the client rather than the entire list for client-side filtering.
  • Pageflow debugging and testing tools.
  • Calendaring to control deadlines and work assignment. This allows different calendars to be created for different business areas, each of which can have its own time zone, holiday schedule and working hours. These calendars are then used to calculate deadlines for work assigned to a business unit that references that calendar. Calendars can be assigned to work dynamically at runtime, or at design-time.
  • Changes to the in-process event handling, with improved support for event handler patterns including non-interrupting boundary events for catching external thrown events.
  • Enhancements to work item deadline handling and priority management.
  • Immediate reply with process ID when starting a process instance using a web service.
  • Optimization of large forms when they are used as application interfaces.

This is a fairly long list of mostly minor features, specifically to address customer requests, and gets the x.0 numbering only to indicate that it’s moving from an early-stage to stable product version.

Going forward, they’re looking a satisfying the needs of the initial customers and core market, then adding features for the pure BPMS functionality and intelligent business platform. The high priority candidates include a number of performance enhancements, plus improvements to single sign-on and multi-tenancy. Medium priorities include enhanced form control support; getting BPM event data into external systems by defining custom events and including business data in externally published events; enhanced access control; enhanced web services; and greater control over process instance data purging.

In order to compete better in the BPMS market, they’re looking at updating their standards compliance (BPMS 2.0 and CMIS), and providing a case management offering. Case management will include an adaptive end user interface, global case data and content management integration, improved integration with social streams including tibbr and Nimbus, and plan-based process management (i.e., using a Gantt chart style interface). They will be moving onto the Silver Marketplace structure for public cloud, which I know will be exciting for a number of customers.

Looking at the intelligent business platform functionality, their vision includes event intelligence and the use of realtime data to inform process execution. There will also be enhancements to their AMX Decisions rules product, which is pretty rudimentary right now.

iProcess is still alive and well, with a list of performance and feature enhancements, but they’re certainly not encouraging new development on iProcess. However, they do not appear to be throwing the existing iProcess customers under the bus by sunsetting the product any time soon.

BPM systems are becoming complete development environment for enterprise application development, and any BPMS needs to offer a complete suite of capabilities for application developers as well as business analyst and end-user tools. AMX BPM is continuing to build out their feature set, in part by integrating with other products in their portfolio, and they offer a fairly complete set of functions as they move into the version 2.x product cycle. The challenge for them is not so much new customers, which they are now well-positioned to win, but in convincing the existing iProcess customers to redevelop their iProcess applications on AMX BPM, or at least to start new application development on AMX BPM.

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 2 Keynotes: Consumerization of IT

We’re on the last of the four themes for TUCON, with Matt Quinn kicking off the session on the consumerization of enterprise IT. It’s a telling sign that many vendors now refer to their products as being like “Facebook/Twitter/iTunes/<insert popular consumer software here> for the enterprise” – enterprise app vendors definitely have consumer app envy, and TIBCO is no exception. As we saw in the earlier keynote session about tibbr, TIBCO is offering a lot of functionality that mimics (and extends) successful consumer software, and their providing Silver Mobile Server as a way to put all of that enterprise functionality that you build using TIBCO products out onto mobile devices. We saw a demo of a app that was built using Silver Mobile Server for submitting and managing auto insurance claims, and it looks like the platform is pretty capable both in terms of using the native device capabilities and linking directly to back-end processes.

They showed some new enhancements to Silver Fabric for private cloud provisioning and management, and discussed their public cloud applications (tibbr, Spotfire, Loyalty Lab) and public Silver Marketplace functionality. Today, they announced Silver Integrator, running on Silver Marketplace, providing enterprise-class integration services on the public cloud. We saw a brief demo of Silver Integrator: it launches a cloud version of the TIBCO Designer with some additional palettes for cloud connectors such as Facebook, Salesforce and REST services.

Being able to extend enterprise applications onto mobile devices and into the cloud are critical capabilities for consumerization of IT, and TIBCO (as well as other vendors) are offering those capabilities. The problem of adoption, however, is usually not about product capabilities, it’s about organizational culture: there is a lot of resistance to this trend not in the user community, but within IT. I saw a graphic and blog post by Dion Hinchcliffe of Dachis Group today about the major shifts happening in IT, and one thing that he wrote was especially impactful:

Never in my two decades of experience in the IT world have I seen such a disparity between where the world is heading as a whole and the technology approach that many companies are using to run their businesses.

<p>Cloud, mobile, social, consumerization and big data: we’re all doing it in the consumer space, but IT departments are continuing to drag their feet at bringing this into the enterprise. The organizations that fail to embrace this are going to fall further behind in their ability to serve customers effectively and to innovate, and will suffer for it.</p>  <p>Quinn wrapped up with a list of their product announcements, including two new policy-driven governance products as part of the ActiveMatrix suite: AMX Service Gateway for providing enterprise services outside the firewall, and AMX Policy Director for managing security, auditing and logging rules for services. He covered their AMX BPM 2.0 release announcement briefly, with new functionality for work assignment and scheduling, case management, and page flow debugging, plus some new capabilities in Nimbus Control and FormVine.</p>  <p>That’s it for the keynotes, since the rest of today and all of tomorrow is breakout sessions where we can dig into the details of the products and how they’re being used by customers. I’ll be heading to the BPM product update this afternoon by Roger King and Justin Brunt, and probably also drop in on the tibbr product strategy to see more details of what we heard this morning.</p>  <p>I’ve been asked to step in for a last-minute cancellation and will be <a href="https://column2.com/2012/09/tibco-tucon2012-you-say-you-want-a-process-revolution/">presenting tomorrow morning at 10am on the process revolution</a> that is moving beyond implementing BPM just for cost savings, but looking at new business process metrics such as maximizing customer satisfaction. If you’re here at TUCON, come on out to the session tomorrow morning.

TIBCO TUCON2012: You Say You Want A (Process) Revolution?

I’ve been asked to fill in for a last-minute cancellation at a breakout session here tomorrow (Thursday) morning, and keeping with the retro music theme that we’ve been hearing here at TUCON, we’re going to have a process revolution:

Process Revolution: Turn Operational Efficiency into Operational Advantage

When starting a business process management (BPM) program, the first step is to achieve operational efficiency and its benefits: cut costs, improve agility through process automation, and ensure regulatory compliance with process transparency. What are the next steps? In this session, learn how you can take your BPM program to the next level. We’ll showcase strategies you can use to not only support process  innovation, but ensure every opportunity is a potential source of revenue generation and increased customer satisfaction. Additionally, we’ll outline how our next-generation BPM fits into the overall event-enabled enterprise.

Rachel Brennan, TIBCO’s BPM product marketing manager, will be up there with me to cover the TIBCO-specific parts about their AMX BPM product, while I discuss the main theme of moving from implementing BPM for cost and compliance reasons to a focus on other criteria such as customer satisfaction.

It’s at 10am, but I’m not sure of the room since the original presentation was added late enough that it didn’t make the printed schedule, the online schedule shows the session but not the location, and the app is completely missing it (for now).

Update: the session is on Thursday from 10:00-10:50am in Juniper 1.

Update 2: we’re now in the app!

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 2 Keynotes: More Big Data and Social Collaboration

Yesterday, the keynotes talked about customer experience management and big data; this morning, we continued on the big data theme with John Shewell of McKesson Enterprise Intelligence talking about the issues in US healthcare: costs are increasing, and are far beyond that of other industrialized countries, yet the US does not have better healthcare than many other countries: it ranks 50th in life expectancy, and 30th in infant mortality rate. Most of the healthcare spending is on a small percentage of the population, often to treat chronic conditions that are preventable and/or treatable. Some portion of the healthcare spend is waste, to the tune of an estimated $700B per year, some of which can be eliminated by ensuring that standard procedures are followed by hospitals, physicians, pharmacies and other healthcare professionals. McKesson, as a provider of healthcare information and systems, has systems in place with hospitals and physicians that can collect information about healthcare procedures as they are executed, but the move to electronic health records is still ongoing and a lot of the data is fairly unstructured, presenting some challenges in mining the data for opportunities to improve procedural compliance and the quality of care.

Historically, healthcare data was in silos, making it difficult to get a holistic view of a patient. In the US, the only place where all the data came together was at the health insurance company (if you had health insurance, of course), and that might be several weeks after the event. If follow-up care was required after a hospital visit, for example, that information didn’t pop up anywhere, since it fell through the cracks in responsibility. One change that can improve this is to align incentives between the provider, payer and patient, so that it’s to everyone’s benefit if the patient is not readmitted due to a missed follow-up appointment. It’s also important to manage patients earlier to detect and avoid problems before they occur. Big data can help with all of these by detecting patterns and ensuring procedural compliance. In closing, he pointed out that this is not a government issue: it needs to be fixed by the industry.

We moved on to the social collaboration theme, with Ram Menon, TIBCO’s president of social computing, talking about tibbr: as an enterprise social networking platform, this is positioned as a “social bus”, much like TIBCO’s earlier technology success is based on the enterprise message bus. In 18 months, tibbr has grown to be used by over a million people – more than half using smartphones – in 104 countries. TIBCO’s heritage with events and messaging is essential to this success, because tibbr isn’t just about following people, it’s also about following physical devices/items, business processes, files and applications. Earlier this year, they launched tibbrGEO, which has physical locations pushing information to people who are nearby, based on their profile.

Menon was joined briefly by Hervé Coureil, CIO of Schneider Electric, then Jay Grant, Secretary General of InterPortPolice to talk about how they are using tibbr for social networking within and across organizations. He then announced tibbr 4, to be released within a few weeks, with a number of new features:

  • Social Profile – presenting a view of yourself to your colleagues (think LinkedIn)
  • Peer Influence – the impact that you have on the things with which you interact (think Klout)
  • tibbr Insights – social analytics, showing a summary of what’s happening in your social network, including both activities and requests waiting for action

We saw a demo of tibbr, which presents a Facebook-like interface for seeing updates from your social graph, but also allows something very similar to Facebook pages for other entities, such as customers. From a CRM standpoint, this allows all information about the customer to be surfaced in one place: a single pane of glass through which to view a customer.

tibbr 4 also provides a social graph API allowing that social graph being collected within tibbr to be accessed from other applications, as well as provide add-on functionality to tibbr, and a marketplace for these applications that allows tibbr users to add them to their own tibbr environment. They have some new partners that are offering applications right now for tibbr: box for cloud content storage and sharing; Wayin for surveys and sentiment analysis; Badgeville for engagement through gamification and incentives; and several others including Whodini, ManyWorlds, BrightIdea, Teamly and FileBoard.

TIBCO Corporate and Technology Analyst Briefing at TUCON2012

Murray Rode, COO of TIBCO, started the analyst briefings with an overview of technology trends (as we heard this morning, mobile, cloud, social, events) and business trends (loyalty and cross-selling, cost reduction and efficiency gains, risk management and compliance, metrics and analytics) to create the four themes that they’re discussing at this conference: digital customer experience, big data, social collaboration, and consumerization of IT. TIBCO provides a platform of integrated products and functionality in five main areas:

  • Automation, including messaging, SOA, BPM, MDM, and other middleware
  • Event processing, including events/CEP, rules, in-memory data grid and log management
  • Analytics, including visual analysis, data discovery, and statistics
  • Cloud, including private/hybrid model, cloud platform apps, and deployment options
  • Social, including enterprise social media, and collaboration

A bit disappointing to see BPM relegated to being just a piece of the automation middleware, but important to remember that TIBCO is an integration technology company at heart, and that’s ultimately what BPM is to them.

Taking a look at their corporate performance, they have almost $1B in revenue for FY2011, showing growth of 44% over the past two years, with 4,000 customers and 3,500 employees. They continue to invest 14% of revenue into R&D with a 20% increase in headcount, and significant increases in investment in sales and marketing, which is pushing this growth. Their top verticals are financial services and telecom, and while they still do 50% of their business in the Americas, EMEA is at 40%, and APJ making up the other 10% and showing the largest growth. They have a broad core sales force, but have dedicated sales forces for a few specialized products, including Spotfire, tibbr and Nimbus, as well as for vertical industries.

They continue to extend their technology platform through acquisitions and organic growth across all five areas of the platform functionality. They see the automation components as being “large and stable”, meaning we can’t expect to see a lot of new investment here, while the other four areas are all “increasing”. Not too surprising considering that AMX BPM was a fairly recent and major overhaul of their BPM platform and (hopefully) won’t need major rework for a while, and the other areas all include components that would integrate as part of a BPM deployment.

Matt Quinn then reviewed the technology strategy: extending the number of components in the platform as well as deepening the functionality. We heard about some of this earlier, such as the new messaging appliances and Spotfire 5 release, some recent releases of existing platforms such as ActiveSpaces, ActiveMatrix and Business Events, plus some cloud, mobile and social enhancements that will be announced tomorrow so I can’t tell you about them yet.

We also heard a bit more on the rules modeling that I saw before the sessions this morning: it’s their new BPMN modeling for rules. This uses BPMN 1.2 notation to chain together decision tables and other rule components into decision services, which can then be called directly as tasks within a BPMN process model, or exposed as web services (SOAP only for now, but since ActiveMatrix is now supporting REST/JSON, I’m hopeful for this). Sounds a bit weird, but it actually makes sense when you think about how rules are formed into composite decision services.

There was a lot more information about a lot more products, and then my head exploded.

Like others in the audience, I started getting product fatigue, and just picking out details of products that are relevant to me. This really drove home that the TIBCO product portfolio is big and complex, and this might benefit from having a few separate analyst sessions with some sort of product grouping, although there is so much overlap and integration in product areas that I’m not sure how they would sensibly split it up. Even for my area of coverage, there was just too much information to capture, much less absorb.

We finished up with a panel of the top-level TIBCO execs, the first question of which was about how the sales force can even start to comprehend the entire breadth of the product portfolio in order to be successful selling it. This isn’t a problem unique to TIBCO: any broad-based platform vendor such as IBM and Oracle have the same issue. TIBCO’s answer: specialized sales force overlays for specific products and industry verticals, and selling solutions rather than individual products. Both of those work to a certain extent, but often solutions end up being no more than glorified templates developed as sales tools rather than actual solutions, and can lead to more rather than less legacy code.

Because of the broad portfolio, there’s also confusion in the customer base, many of whom see one TIBCO product and have no idea of everything else that TIBCO does. Since TIBCO is not quite the household name like IBM or Oracle, companies don’t necessarily know that TIBCO has other things to offer. One of my banking clients, on hearing that I am at the TIBCO conference this week, emailed “Heard of them as a player in the Cloud Computing space.  What’s different or unique about them vs others?” Yes, they play in the cloud. But that’s hardly what you would expect a bank (that uses very little cloud infrastructure, and likely does have some TIBCO products installed somewhere) to think of first when you mention TIBCO.

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 1 Keynotes, Part 2: Big Honking Data

Back from the mid-morning break, CMO Raj Verma shifted gears from customer experience management to look at one of the other factors introduced in the first part of the session: big data.

Matt Quinn was back to talk about big data: in some ways, this isn’t new, since there has been a lot of data within enterprises for many years. What’s changed is that we now have the tools to deal with it, both in place and in motion, to find the patterns hiding within it through cleansing and transformation. He makes a sports analogy, saying that a game is not just about the final score, but about all of the events that happen to make up the entire game; similarly, it is not sufficient any more to just measure outcomes in business transactions, you have to monitor patterns in the event streams and combine that with historical data to make the best possible decisions about what is happening right now. He referred to this combination of event processing and analytics as closing the loop between data in motion and data at rest. TIBCO provides a number of products that combine to handle big data: not just CEP, but ActiveSpaces (the in-memory data grid) to enable realtime processing, Spotfire for visual analytics and integration with Hadoop.

We saw a demo of LogLogic, recently acquired by TIBCO, which provides analytics and event detection on server logs. This might sound like a bit of a boring topic, but I’m totally on with this: too many companies just turn off logging on their servers because it generates too many events that they just can’t do anything with, and it impacts performance since logging is done on the operational server. LogLogic’s appliance can collect enormous amounts of log data, detect unusual events based on various rules, and integrate with Spotfire for visualization of potential security threats.

Mark Lorion, CMO for TIBCO Spotfire, came up to announce Spotfire 5, with a complete overhaul to the analytics engine, and including the industry’s first enterprise runtime for the R statistical language, providing 10 times the performance of the open source R project for predictive analytics. Self-service predictive analytics, ftw. They are also going beyond in-memory, integrating with Teradata, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server for in-database analysis. With Teradata horsepower behind it – today’s announcement of Spotfire being optimized for in-database computation on Teradata – you can now do near-realtime exploration and visualization of some shocking amounts of data. Brad Hopper gave us a great Spotfire demo, not something that most TUCON attendees are used to seeing on the main stage.

Rob Friel, CEO of PerkinElmer, took the stage to talk about how they are using big data and analytics in their scientific innovations in life sciences: screening patient data, environmental samples, human genomes, and drug trials to detect patterns that can improve quality of life in some way. They screened 31 million babies born last year (one in four around the globe) through the standard heel-prick blood test, and detected 18,000 with otherwise undiagnosed disorders that could be cured or treated. Their instrumentation is key in acquiring all the data, but once it’s there, tools such as Spotfire empower their scientists to discover and act on what they find in the data. Just as MGM Grand is delivering unique experiences to each customer, PerkinElmer is trying to enable personalized health monitoring and care for each patient.

To wrap up the big data section, Denny Page, TIBCO’s VP of Engineering, came on stage with his new hardware babies: a FTL Message switch and an EMS appliance, both to be available by the end of November 2012.

For the final part of the day 1 keynotes, we heard from an innovators’ panel of Scott McNealy (founder of Sun Microsystems, now chairman of Wayin), Tom Siebel (founder of Siebel Systems, now at C3 Energy where they are using TIBCO for energy usage analytics), Vivek Ranadivé, and KR Sridhar (CEO of Bloom Energy), chaired by David Kirkpatrick. Interesting and wide-ranging discussion about big data, analytics, sentiment analysis, enterprise social media, making data actionable, the internet of things and how a low barrier to platform exit drives innovation. The panel thinks that the best things in tech are yet to come, and I’m in agreement, although those who are paranoid about the impact of big data on their privacy should be very, very afraid.

I’ll be blogging from the analyst event for the rest of the day: we have corporate and technology briefings from the TIBCO execs plus some 1:1 sessions. No pool time for me today!

TIBCO TUCON2012 Day 1 Keynotes, Part 1

The keynotes started with TIBCO’s CEO, Vivek Ranadivé, talking about the forces driving change: a massive explosion of data (big data), the emergence of mobility, the emergence of platforms, the rise of Asia (he referenced the Gangnam Style video, although did not actually do the dance), and how math is trumping science (e.g., the detection and exploitation of patterns). The ability to harness these forces and produce extreme value is a competitive differentiator, and is working for companies like Apple and Amazon.

Raj Verma, TIBCO’s CMO, was up next, continuing the message of how fast things are changing: more iPhones were sold over the past few days than babies were born worldwide, and Amazon added more computing capacity last night than they had in total in 2001. He (re)introduced their concept of the two-second advantage – the right information a little bit before an event is worth infinitely more than any amount of information after the event – enabled by an event-enabled enterprise (or E3, supported by, of course, TIBCO infrastructure). Regardless of whether or not you use TIBCO products, this is a key point: if you’re going to exploit the massive amounts of data being generated today in order to produce extreme value, you’re going to need to be an event-enabled enterprise, responding to events rather than just measuring outcomes after the fact.

He discussed the intersection of four forces: cloud, big data, social collaboration and mobility. This is not a unique message – every vendor, analyst and consultant are talking about this – but he dug into some of these in detail: mobile, for example, is no longer discretionary, even (or maybe especially) in countries where food and resources are scarce. The four of these together all overlap in the consumerization of IT, and are reshaping enterprise IT. A key corporate change driven by these is customer experience management: becoming the brand that customers think of first when the product class is mentioned, and turning customers into fans. Digital marketing, properly done, turns your business into a social network, and turns customer management into fan management.

Matt Quinn, CTO, continued the idea of turning customers into fans, and solidifying customer loyalty. To do this, he introduced TIBCO’s “billion dollar backend” with its platform components of automation, event processing, analytics, cloud and social, and hosted a series of speakers on the subject of customer experience management.

We then heard from a customer, Chris Nordling, EVP of Operations and CIO of MGM Resorts and CityCenter, who use TIBCO for their MLife customer experience management/loyalty program. Their vision is to track everything about you from your gambling wins/losses to your preferences in restaurants and entertainment, and use that to build personalized experiences on the fly. By capturing the flow of big data and responding to events in realtime, the technology provides their marketing team with the ability to provide a zero-friction offer to each customer individually before they even know that they want something: offering reduced entertainment tickets just as you’re finishing a big losing streak at the blackjack tables, for example. It’s a bit creepy, but at the same time, has the potential to provide a better customer experience. Just a bit of insight into what they’re spending that outrageous $25/day resort fee on.

Quinn came back to have a discussion with one of their “loyalty scientists” (really??) about Loyalty Lab, TIBCO’s platform/service for loyalty management, which is all about analyzing events and data in realtime, and providing “audience of one” service and offerings. Traditional loyalty programs were transaction-based, but today’s loyalty programs are much more about providing a more holistic view of the customer. This can include not just events that happen in a company’s own systems, but include external social media information, such as the customer’s tweets. I know all about that.

Another customer, Rick Welts of the Golden State Warriors (who, ironically, play at the Oracle stadium) talked about not just customer loyalty management, but the Moneyball-style analytics that they apply to players on a very granular scale: each play of each game is captured and analyzed to maximize performance. They’re also using their mobile app for a variety of customer service initiatives, from on-premise seat upgrades to ordering food directly from your seat in the stadium.

Mid-morning break, and I’ll continue afterwards.

As an aside, I’m not usually wide awake enough to get much out of the breakfast-in-the-showcase walkabout, but this morning prior to the opening sessions, I did have a chance to see the new TIBCO decision services integrated into BPM, also available as standalone services. Looked cool, more on that later.