Pioneering Real-time Computing: TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé (Part 6)

SM: What was the highlight of your TIBCO journey?

VR: The highlight is ahead. The best days are still to come.

SM: Based on what has happened to date, how would you answer that question?

VR: For the longest time, when I first started people said to me that there was not a market for integration. It could all be done in the database. Now that has been put to rest. The next thing they said was that there were 20 players in this market so there would be no way to differentiate.

SM: How do you differentiate?

VR: We have great technology. We picked great customers and solved really hard problems.

SM: Given where you were in the food chain with TIBCO, it is hard to demonstrate that you have great technology. In the application software business, proof of concept is much easier. How do you demonstrate an integration layer business?

VR: You are absolutely right; it is hard to do that. Initially you find customers who have tried everything and just have not been able to solve their problems. The scale is such that there is no way to solve it. Initially we were with leading edge customers like Cisco, Intel and the telecoms.

SM: And then you used reference customers to sell?

VR: Also, those customers were like the gold standard in their business. We would pick the biggest and best. They had very smart people. They had tried everything and it had come up short. When nobody else would solve the problem they would come to us, and then we had to prove that we could do it.

SM: If your sales person picks up the phone and tries to engage a customer and says, “We have the best technology,” the person on the other end of that conversation is thinking, “Yeah, right!”

VR: Exactly. There are not that many people who can say that they have gone head-on against IBM and beaten them, in a situation where IBM has thrown everything and the kitchen sink at the problem and lost. There are not too many people who can say that the customer trusts them with what is the lifeblood of their business.

SM: As you were developing the reference customers you could say these things, and that was what was building your credibility.

VR: They were trusting us with problems that if we did not get right, their business would go down. If the trading floor goes down the banks stop, the airlines stop, phone companies stop, and the web stops. Much of the world goes down.

SM: Where do you go from here?

VR: We have this vision when we look at the evaluation of IT technology in the enterprise. Enterprise 1.0 was the ’60s, which was the mainframe era. I like to look at the scope and velocity of business and life in each of these areas. Here is a banking example. In the ’60’s there might be a few thousand branches to support 10 million customers. You might walk into a branch every two weeks to deposit a check. If you could do that in 20 minutes it was a good day.

About 20 years ago, with the emergence of the database, we moved to Enterprise 2.0. We have gone from batched to online. Information is available. Software is tied to the database, not hardware. You go from thousands of touch points to millions because information is accessible everywhere.

We are now entering the next era of Enterprise 3.0. The same 10 million customers come to a bank’s premise, which can be an ATM, website, phone or physical location, ten times a month. That bank now has 100 million events happening every single month. Sitting at the back of the bank is a terabyte of storage. A bank’s ability to take each of those events, tie them back to that terabyte of storage and determine at that exact moment in time if it is up sale, back sell, fraud, or customer loss is the event-driven era.

Enterprise 3.0 will have a cloud in which everything is happening. You will go away from ERP to business processes. We will move away from reporting systems to predictive systems. There is a new stack which is emerging, and we believe that what Oracle was to Enterprise 2.0, we will be for Enterprise 3.0.

SM: What piece of the stack will you handle?

VR: The whole stack. We do that right now. The infrastructure for the cloud. We are cloud middleware and handle rules and event processing. The applications server of this era will be an event processing engine. This will be for bus and events.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Pioneering Real-time Computing: TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé
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