From a case study I wrote on BP’s CTO innovation Group in The New Polymath
As the group ’ s stature has grown within BP, many business unit leaders insist on its involvement in many innovation areas. Darukhanavala cites a recent example with a unit in Alaska. His team went up to discuss a previously identified set of projects. During that meeting, senior management pulled him aside and asked, “Why are we using you for such tactical projects? Let us show you far more complex challenges you can help us with. ”
I felt a sense of deja vu during TUCON this week.
Walk the solutions floor, and as my friend Sandy Kemsley (who has followed Tibco from a BPM perspective for years) says you can easily get “product fatigue” with offerings spread across 5 areas:
- Automation, including messaging, SOA, BPM, MDM, and other middleware
- Event processing, including events/CEP, rules, in-memory data grid and log management
- Analytics, including visual analysis, data discovery, and statistics
- Cloud, including private/hybrid model, cloud platform apps, and deployment options
- Social, including enterprise social media, and collaboration
But listen to the customer executives who presented at the conference (from a wide range of industries from McKesson to MGM) and listen to CEO Vivek Ranadive talk one on one about other in-process customer projects and the conversations are in business language. You feel you are watching a series of IBM Smarter Planet commercials. Longer ones, and on stage. Indeed, TIBCO executives joke that IBM is their marketing arm. They can paint the vision, Tibco does the heavy lifting.
I get the sense there are plenty of conversations like
“Vivek, we need better pattern recognition in this area”
“Vivek, give me the two second advantage you keep talking about”
“Don’t bore me with the product names like LogLogic and tibbr. Just focus on my outcomes.”
As Vivek says “ the keep-the-lights on CIO is not my ideal customer”.
He would rather have the Alaska BP conversation “Let us show you far more complex challenges you can help us with, Vivek”
