After it had been over 18 months since the last TIBCO NOW™ event, last May (17, 18 and 19) TIBCO again organized an impressive edition of this conference. This time at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas.
Some facts and figures:
- Over 1800 visitors
- Over 90 partners from 25 countries
- 50 customer presentations
- Over 120 breakout sessions
- 80 showcase demo’s
- Over 20 hands-on labs, trainings and certification sessions
- The Digital Hub, a huge area full of stands, meetingpoints, demo’s and games
Impressive
It was my first time in America and thus also in Vegas. Very impressive. Not only Vegas made a huge impression on me – but let’s not talk about that; after all, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.. – also the very well organized TIBCO event did. Not only were there many announcements of new versions of products, several new products were released as well.
HOW products were developed
The most important thing I learned this conference, is that TIBCO has drastically changed the philosophy behind its product development. According to Matt Quinn (EVP & CTO) the last 18 months TIBCO has focused a lot on innovation, focusing not just on WHAT products they developed, but even more on HOW these products were developed.
Core principles:
- Cloud First (PaaS, xPaaS, SaaS)
- Ease of Use (Improved User Experience, Industry Solutions and Frameworks, Community)
- Industrialization (Improved Cross-Product Integration, Improved DevOps Support, Internet of Things)
Two of these principles really stood out for me. First ‘Cloud First’, meaning that TIBCO intends to make all their new products cloud based (whether it’s public cloud or private cloud on premises). The second one was the improved DevOps Support. TIBCO has finally come to realize that they had become a too ‘closed’ vendor. They announced exposure of many of their internal interfaces for integration with other vendor’s platforms, such as for instance Docker and CloudFoundry. Furthermore they finally recognized the importance of the users, the partner, the customers and the community. So TIBCO is opening up and listens to them in order to improve and adhere to their requirements.
Product engagement process
Another change that TIBCO has implemented, is the product engagement process for customers. Executive Vice President Rajnish Verma explained that the ‘old’ buyer’s journey took ages and involved many formal steps: Awareness, Consideration, Comparison, Preference, Transaction, Deploy and Scaling. Whilst the new buyer’s journey will be much simpler:
Try Now – Buy Now – Scale
Obviously with the introduction of their cloud products this is now possible.
Inspirational speakers
TIBCO invited two very inspirational speakers. 
First Ray Kurzweil – an American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist who shared his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
The second speaker that inspired me was NASA’s lead engineer Adam Steltzner – he gave a very inspiring speech about lessons that he learned on innovation collaboration, decision-making under pressure and lessons he learned from his team of engineers that managed to put the biggest exploration vehicle ‘Pathfinder’ on the surface of Mars.
Product updates
Many updated versions of existing products were announced, such as AMX BPM 4.1, AMX BW 6.4.2 and TIBCO MDM 9. It was even announced that BPM will be made available as a cloud service as well in the near future.
The messaging portfolio has also been updated with TIBCO FTL 5.0 and TIBCO eFTL 3.0. FTL 5.0 has been enhanced with more data stream monitoring capabilities and with eFTL 3.0 it is now possible to extend messaging for usage in Internet of Things solutions.
New product offerings
A lot of attention went to two interesting new product offerings. To mention some:
TIBCO Business Works Container Edition 2.0 – A cloud based platform for building core integration in a simplified Business Works native fashion using Cloud Foundry standards. It has been designed to work and integrate with other tools and platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes, and integrates with TIBCO Mashery (API Management tool) too. Meaning that you can develop a service once and deploy it directly on different cloud based platforms without having to change the code to make it fit for each platform. This will give the user a lot of flexibility of where to deploy this service.
TIBCO Cloud Integration 1.0 – This newly introduced cloud based platform can be used to model, create, test and deploy APIs. Of course it integrates seamlessly with TIBCO Mashery as well. The API behavior can be easily modified using so called Microflows, where you can easily define policies, properties using Node.JS.
TIBCO Project Flogo – An open source licensed platform that functions as a design platform for IoT edge application development, with a tile-based, zero-code environment for building and deploying integration and data processing directly onto connected devices. Its Web-based UI brings TIBCO’s design environments to the IoT, with prepackaged drag-and-drop building blocks, integration, data processing and microservices, as well as error handling including an auto-stepback web based debugger. Project Flogo is a light weight platform that is up to 20 times lighter than Node.js and 50 times lighter than Java.
Furthermore…
These were my personal highlights. But without a problem I could write several pages more on all the impressions, introductions and innovations I experienced during the TIBCO Now conference. Being there was absolutely worth it, returning home with new insights, lots of inspiration and the knowledge that me and my colleagues are on track and ready for the future.
Want to know more? Please do not hesitate to contact me. I will be more than happy to share my Las Vegas experiences with you. Also the ones that were not suited for print…
