TIBCO helps Cos with visual analytics

Recently Dataquest had a chance to converse with Neeraj Shaabi, Managing Director and Regional Vice President Asia, TIBCO Software, and know how TIBCO is going about the data analytics market. Excerpts:

1.Would you outline TIBCO's roadmap in view of the analytics market in India?

We believe in the principle that timeliness of information is as much, if not more, important than the extent of information. TIBCO's founder Vivek Ranadivé often talks about the Two-Second Advantage to make this point.

It is a very powerful concept, which is basically the idea that "a little bit of information a little bit ahead of time is far more valuable than all of the information after the fact." This is where our unique offering in context to India lies. While the analytics market in India is very broad and perhaps even crowded, TIBCO has a unique play within this space.

We enable companies and organizations to receive valuable data that is in the right context against business issues, insight into their data; quickly and visually. We are also the only company that provides an end-to-end real-time platform to business intelligence and data analytics. For example capital markets trading firms requiring real-time analytics and sophisticated event processing to conduct algorithmic or high-frequency trades or entities managing smart infrastructure which must digest torrents of sensory data to make real-time decisions that optimize use of transportation or public utility infrastructure and so on.

2.What changes have you witnessed in the analytics space?

The analytics market has been going through the classic technology hype cycle and now starting to emerge into several realistic applications.

The trend is pretty much cross-industry, but we do find most vendors attaching their message to buzz words like "big data." These are not new concepts - the idea that data is big and getting bigger is as old as IT. What is more important is the velocity of data or the speed at which the data is building up, called "fast data". The challenge today has moved from "how much data can I store?" to instead "how quickly can I find what I am looking for." This is the big shift today and this is the space where real-time architectures and visual analytics are allowing for unprecedented innovation, in contrast to the traditional approach of business intelligence and reporting.

Increasing impact of social engagement between brands and consumer has pulled in the marketing heads into a lot of technology discussions. The other trend comes from there, an increased interactive visualization of data.

Visualization has a direct correlation with decision-making. According to an Aberdeen Group report marketers who use interactive visualization tools are 78 percent more likely to improve the speed of decision-making than those not using the tools.

3.Are you making investments in India? In what areas?

TIBCO already has significant investments in India. We have been operating in the country since February 2004. We run our biggest product engineering team outside the US from Pune. We also have a large TIBCO Global Services capability, with offshore teams located in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore. These are expert consultants who provide consulting services to our top global clients not only domestically in India but also in North America, Asia and Europe.

A few months ago we inaugurated our newest office facility in Mumbai, which is another sign of our expanding presence in India. We are engaged with a number of key clients across telecom, banking and logistics sectors. Organisations in these sectors would typically generate gargantuan amounts of data or from another perspective have unexplored intelligence, which can be interpreted by these large organisations to maximize value for themselves and most definitely their end customer.

We work with them to help them use our real-time platform to innovate their business models for the 21st century.

4.What are the markets you are focusing at present? 

TIBCO technology solves problems and provides business optimization across mainly three kinds of companies - those who need to move lots money around reliably and quickly, those who move physical goods and those who move data fast.

Traditionally TIBCO has always been strong in the financial services market. This is an area growing through not only growth but also reform in India, so we naturally align to that. Also the telco industry has been a main stay for us, with some of the biggest global players recognizing TIBCO as the industry standard platform for moving data. Similarly we do well with logistics companies that move physical goods, assets and people.

India as a market for each of these verticals provides enormous scale and complexity, and therefore is particularly well suited to us because our technology delivers to its fullest potential when both scale and complexity abound.

5.Do you see India as a favorable place to do business? Suggestions, if any.

Indeed. As said above, India offers unprecedented scale and complexity, and so the opportunity to solve these problems and make real impact is magnified. Also India offers an excellent base of skilled IT professionals as well as young graduates. We harness the potential of both of those as we work with clients domestically and globally.

Lastly with the recent general elections the political and economic framework in India is going through a significant shift as we speak, which hopefully makes India not only favorable but a lot more exciting in the coming year.

6.What is the company's turnover and workforce? Please share details.

TIBCO generates over US 1.1 Billion of revenue and employs approximately 4,600 staff including contractors. We have 84 offices across 33 countries worldwide with global headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Please refer to tibco.com under "Company Information" and "Investor relations" for the most up to date company facts.