On Monday, with the official launch of Tibbr, enterprise integration specialist TIBCO joined the crowded market for enterprise social software tools.
Although at first sight the launch of a social software platform by a vendor previously seen primarily as an IT infrastructure technology company might seem like an odd move: but as was pointed out to us by Stefan Farestam, TIBCO’s Director of Product Marketing in EMEA, TIBCO’s heritage is real-time publish-and-subscribe message delivery. For a couple of decades now TIBCO has used this core expertise to build high-performance messaging technology platforms that link IT applications with other applications; now it’s using this expertise to link groups of people, information sources and systems together. And this link is more than just marketing spin: Tibbr was initially built using TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix messaging middleware platform.
At a high level Tibbr looks not unlike a Facebook page—core to the user experience is an event stream that details items of interest. As hinted above, though, Tibbr—like Salesforce.com’s Chatter—isn’t just an environment where people send messages; information sources and systems of record can also post events for sharing. In addition to this, Tibbr users can also take action on events, launching tasks directly from within the Tibbr event stream.
As well as following individuals like in a traditional microblogging environment, Tibbr places a particular focus on the creation and following of ’subjects’, which are groups focused on a particular interest topic or activity. Subjects are managed in a hierarchy; so, for example, you could set up a top-level subject ‘customers’ and then have individual topics below that for particular industries, particular strategic accounts, and so on. Anyone with sufficient rights can create subjects—subjects can be controlled such that only people with certain rights can create, post to, or subscribe to particular subjects.
Overall, Tibbr looks like a very competitive product, and will stand up well to the competition from a features and functions standpoint. The challenge for TIBCO will be how well it is able to differentiate itself in this very noisy market. While most of its competitors are targeting business users with their marketing and sales, TIBCO’s background is more in line with the IT department. It is aware of this of course, and one of its most important differentiators relates to its ‘IT-friendly’ positioning. Greater openness, the option to deliver the solution on-premise, and TIBCO’s rock-solid enterprise IT reliability and security credentials will also appeal to IT. The challenge is whether organisations are mature enough in their understanding and adoption of these types of social technologies to recognise the need for a more strategic, IT-driven approach. However, this remains a very immature market, and most organisations are a long way from being ready to address social software in such a centralised, strategic way. For those organisations who are more mature in their adoption levels, TIBCO still faces the challenge of how quickly it can roll out pre-packaged integration connectors with a range of popular information stores, systems of record and other tools.
TIBCO’s market entry brings a new, welcome perspective to this market; it faces significant challenges in gaining profile among the many contenders both small and large, but with an effective marketing strategy and strong case studies it has the potential to compete effectively against the more established competition.
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