I had a chance to spend a couple of days at the Tibco TUCON event. In a world full of light social-this and mobile-that, this was as close to enterprise porn as you can get. Large, complex organizations from the Interpol to Deutsche Bank to Southwest Airlines described complex applications handling billions of events at lightning speed without breaking much of a sweat. Hence the 2 second theme of the conference. Sandy Kemsley has done an outstanding job summarizing many of the presentations (live blogging in keeping with 2 second time theme) and Dennis Howlett plans to post several videos of the presentations.
It was refreshing to see most of these executives talk business. In fact, the Reliance executive put up an architecture slide and said "that's my mandatory technology slide but I will not dwell on it. If you have questions on that, I will wait for you outside". A later breakout conversation I had with with Alan Harrington of Tibco was even more fascinating as he talked about smart grids and impact on utility customers, operations and assets, and sophisticated retail customer analytics. I came close a few times to calling Wiley and saying - stop the presses, I have another chapter to add to The New Polymath. I had tried to get Tibco case studies in the book, but something fell through the cracks in their marketing, and we could not to my disappointment.
In contrast, the expo hall was all about tech jargon - CEP, SOA, BPM etc. I ran into many Gartner colleagues I had not seen in a decade - yup the same culprits who unleashed those TLAs on the market:) This is classic IT I thought - little alignment with the biz talk in the main tent.
So, how do you reconcile the two very different business and IT cultures? I asked Rourke McNanamra of Tibco. Is it Accenture or another consulting firm which is the bridge? He said a few years ago, it took pioneers like Gary Loveman at Harrah's to define a strategic technology vision and guide Tibco. Starting a year ago, he said he has seen more and more IT groups comfortable talking the business talk. You have to do a double and triple check to ensure they are not from the business side. No Accenture needed - well at least not for the visioning. Still need them and other SIs as supplemental staff on the implementation.
That to me was the biggest aha from the conference. IT people in complex organizations (I saw others from Dow, Bank of America, Citigroup in the hallways) talking business. And Tibco, a classic messaging, middleware, IT infrastructure, TLA company able to keep up. And deliver it FTL.
I am going to miss the concert by Huey Lewis this evening as I am headed home. But Tibco may want to bribe him to sing that's the power of Love , er Loveman.
