The two executive chasm

I spent a couple of invigorating days at TUCON, Tibco's user conference. Every executive session like the one below Dennis Howlett kindly shared we had with the CEO Vivek Ranadive was strategic and built off the theme of his new co-authored book The Two Second Advantage. (for a longer version of the interview see his blog post). I had other sessions with Matt Quinn, CTO and Ram Menon, EVP and the messaging was consistent - a focus on the right business events in the right context trumps analyzing masses of content and data. In Matt's words "capture many events, store few transactions” as my fellow EI Sandy Kemsley analyzes here.

In contrast the solutions floor was aimed at the traditional IT middleware/messaaging/BPM audience Tibco has flourished in and many new ones it has developed or acquired like Tibbr, Loyalty Lab, Spotfire and Nimbus. The chasm between the messaging and the solutions was nicely bridged by a series of executive sessions and customer meetings.

There was David Calhoun, CEO of Nielsen, explaining how his company helps most major brands around the world understand what their customers watch on their TVs and other devices, and what they buy, and even more impressively the correlation between what they watch and buy. Rob Carter, CIO of Fedex explaining the core tenet of the company "information on a package is as important as the package" driving the huge delivery and tracking infrastructure that runs the company and much of the world's logistics. MGM Resorts CIO Becky Wanta explaining the technology vision for the M Life Players Club aimed at their repeat customers. There was Charlie Feld summarizing his 40+ years in the industry and his influence at Frito-Lay, Delta and several other companies. None of them touched in gory details on specific Tibco products in their presentations but you could sense from their tone the heavy lifting Tibco is helping their companies with.  I had other meetings with customers from Qualcomm, Virgin America and from several other industries - the applications and business results they described were impressive in their divesrity and impact.

I walked away impressed that in its somewhat low-key marketing style Tibco has learned to bridge the gap between the technical and the business executives. The sub-title of Vivek's book is How we Succeed by Anticipating the Future - Just Enough. In a world of IT excess, Just Enough sounds magical to business executives.