As I continue to pick my way through the recent spate of merger and acquisition activity in the analytics and business intelligence market, it’s the turn of Tibco's $195m acquisition of Spotfire last month, to come under scrutiny.
The first thing this deal did was to get me thinking about the convergence between analytics, real-time event processing and business process management.
Tibco has clearly spotted (excuse the pun) an opportunity to realize its vision of the supporting what it refers to as "predictive business [to which I would add "processes"]." Its first stab at this was through the release of BusinessEvents (a second release was announced just last week) that blends data integration with real-time analytics.
The idea behind the Spotfire acquisition is to take business event management to the next level by applying analytics to determine the relevance of monitoring events and activities and optimize the processes they support. I see the most immediate opportunity is for Tibco is to target companies that have already deployed BI and analytic capabilities and are now looking to underlay that with a real-time process and event management infrastructure.
But from a purely commercial perspective Tibco's predictive business strategy is a convenient rouse for Tibco wanting to expand its business beyond its core business integration infrastructure. It's no secret that the company has been trying for years to broaden its product portfolio around its core service oriented architecture (SOA) and business events integration bus.
Tibco's swoop also reinforces the view held by some that BPM and SOA will eventually swallow analytics and BI. The two are by no means mutually exclusive and undoubtedly Tibco will be keen to initially synch Spotfire's analytics into its BPM offerings.
But in the longer run Tibco could even meld its analytics more deeply into its stack – as part of its real-time information and message bus. Now that would be an interesting turn of events in both markets – especially as more companies start to position their data warehouses as Web services tapped by other applications and processes connected by SOA or middleware, including, you guessed it, an enterprise service bus (ESB).
So to recap, the obvious points of this deal:
- Spotfire now gives Tibco's business another dimension, real-time, event driven analytics for process improvement, that will bolster its presence in the business process management market and help the company to compete against rival's proprietary stacks.
- Tibco gains entry into new markets, such as high-tech manufacturing, clinical trial analytics in the pharmaceutical and energy sectors. Spotfire has an impressive blue-chip customer base including Toshiba, Merck, Pfizer, and Chevron.
- Spotfire gains access to Tibco's numerous strong financial services and telecoms customers.
And the not so obvious:
- Spotfire gets new resources under Tibco and the opportunity to expand its footprint in operational BI by taking advantage of deeper integration points (nearer to an event-driven service bus) that are beyond the reach of most other BI software providers. The response of traditional BI vendors also focused on operationalizing their BI technologies to support real-time decision making will be interesting to see.
And the obligatory question mark:
- Is Tibco the "right" company to tap Spotfire's technology. Spotfire's Ajax-fronted visual analytics is a world apart from Tibco's core enterprise application integration roots. Will their sales force be able to sell a joint proposition?
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