The week after Progress’ Revolution customer event in Boston, I spent a few days in Vegas courtesy of TIBCO at its annual TUCON customer shindig. At one level, there are some interesting parallels to draw between Progress and TIBCO*: both vendors are ‘independent’ infrastructure software providers; both are currently pitching visions of responsiveness to their markets (“Operational Responsiveness” and “The Two Second Advantage” respectively); and both have changed the direction of their businesses through strings of technology company acquisitions. However TIBCO is a fair bit ahead of Progress currently: it’s a larger company, and it’s also used its relatively larger size to enable it to pursue a larger series of acquisitions (as Tony Baer notes, 6 new companies got hitched to TIBCO in 2010 alone).

As with the Progress event the week previous, I didn’t expect to learn much new stuff about products and strategy (Sandy Kemsley has some thorough write-ups of the main sessions); the value for me was more in chatting to customers, prospects and partners in order to get a feel for how these groups perceive the company and where it’s headed. What appears to be the case—from what I heard at TUCON, at least—is that TIBCO is a company with an awful lot of opportunity in front of it; but that it’s also got some work to do to be able to address that opportunity most effectively.

What’s created the opportunity is what’s also behind a significant chunk of the 30%+ year-on-year license revenue growth that TIBCO is currently experiencing: its recent acquisitions. Looking forward, I see the more ‘application focused’ acquisitions it’s made—Loyalty Lab, Nimbus Partners, ForeSight, Netrics, Spotfire—as being absolutely crucial. Why? Because in many cases they enable TIBCO to expand its industry footprint; but, at least as importantly, because they allow TIBCO to sell its capabilities to new kinds of buyer in customer organisations. The people who have historically bought Loyalty Lab, Nimbus and Spotfire products tend to be line-of-business executives; these are audiences that have historically been largely out of the scope of TIBCO’s sales and marketing efforts.

And let’s not forget tibbr: this is an internally-developed product that’s also breaking out as a line-of-business sale. Significant numbers of large enterprise customers have deployed tibbr in the past year (I don’t think I’m at liberty to say publicly how many)—and, critically, for around half of this number tibbr is the first TIBCO product they’ve purchased. The people who are buying into tibbr aren’t architects or developers, either.

The real kick for TIBCO will come if and when it can get these ‘new’ purchasing groups to look beyond their initial products of interest, explore what else TIBCO has to offer, and then invest across TIBCO’s portfolio. But TIBCO can’t afford to promote or sell to this group in the way that it’s used to doing. The company will need to be ready with some answers to new customers’ questions that say more than “we offer market-leading innovation in core middleware domains” (which is what the company has spent 20 years saying to its core customer base).

Now it’s fair to say that TIBCO is making some strides here. For one, it’s busy building out a set of detailed solution frameworks—most notably in telecoms and financial services—that it hopes will showcase how its products address top-line business concerns across a set of industry scenarios. Secondly, it’s also committing to build and maintain specialised sales teams that focus exclusively on serving the more specialised customer groups around Spotfire, Nimbus, Loyalty Lab and others. It’s clear that in 2–3 years it wants the current situation (where the vast majority of sales are of horizontal infrastructure technologies) to flip, so that the vast majority of sales are instead solution-focused.

As I said, though, there’s more to do. Here are some questions that I’ll be looking for answers to, in no particular order: How effective will the specialised salesforces be in bringing the rest of TIBCO’s sales and field personnel to the table? How effective will TIBCO’s general technical sales force be in these situations? How do TIBCO’s recent ‘application focused’ acquisitions play into TIBCO’s overall “two-second advantage” vision? Can the company link these up to help it be as focused as possible?

But perhaps most importantly: does it really make sense to aim to be “the innovation leader in all our key segments“, as TIBCO itself asserted in an analyst session at the event? If you look at the places where TIBCO is seeing most growth and most likely to grow in the coming years, those areas which will drive the most growth aren’t necessarily dependent on market-leading technology innovation.

If TIBCO it’s serious about being more business-focused and using this to drive its growth going forward, then ‘the most innovative’ market spot is quite likely to be a red herring—at least for its core software infrastructure lines. Rather, it should focus on trying its best to bring advanced technologies to new markets through smart packaging and selling.

Now that’s something to aim for—but can TIBCO do it, particularly as it continues to sell the same technologies to IT audiences? It’s clear that the company is riding high and has a lot of energy and momentum… but it’s not always easy to change the way your company thinks when things are going well…

 [*There is another parallel between Progress and TIBCO: both companies had Train as the entertainment as their headline event entertainment provider of choice. Seems like those boys are busy with the corporate gigs!]

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