Market Watch

I've been catching up with some market data over the past number of evenings and I was very pleased to see TIBCO reporting strong earnings particularly in Q4 of 2008 as well as a strong growth in overall revenue in 2008 ($644.5m which is an increase of 12% over the previous year). I still see them as a strong performer in the European Telco and FS space, although they are clearly breaking new ground in other vertical markets in the US (and others).

I have something of a soft spot for TIBCO having 'cut my teeth' on Message Oriented Middleware, primarily Rendezvous and SDK Adapter development throughout the early years of 2000. I am pleased to see them post strong performance as I believe it is healthy for the integration market to retain credible independent players. I sometimes describe TIBCO as a barracuda, lean, agile, and certainly equipped to 'protect itself'. That said, I think it increasingly swims in the shark tank with 'dangerous predators' that play much wider and can offer higher discounts and incentives for 'turn key' enterprise solutions. I was somewhat surprised that TIBCO remained solo after the 'blood in the water' of the Oracle / BEA acquisition. Had the world financial collapse not followed so quickly I wonder if TIBCO might not have ended up in the hands of a large ERP vendor. I would be very skeptical that we will see much further consolidation / acquisition this year as 'cash hoarding' is the norm, but in 2010 will someone be knocking on their door with renewed interest in purchase?

The App Server Question

I've often pondered whether TIBCO suffered or benefited from their lack of JEE Application Server heritage. In many ways I suspect their ESB offering is somewhat simplified and 'cleaner' in implementation (and generally less arcane in configuration) than that of some of its competitors. That said, I think WebSphere Process Server is a very elegant and advanced implementation of SCA (Service Component Architecture) which we see TIBCO making further headway into with developments in ActiveMatrix.

Continuing Developments

I like the positioning of BPM+ (again developments in Business Studio have helped push forward the 'reality' of forward and round-trip engineering in their stack). I am a long-time iProcess / Staffware fan, in fact I played around on many occasions with InConcert and BusinessWorks Workflow, so I knew a good thing when the Staffware purchase was announced! The Business Intelligence and Analytics offerings that the Spotfire acquisition have facilitated remains of great interest. I suspect there was a bolstering of revenue for BI opportunities in '08. I also follow the press releases around the BusinessEvents product. This is a really interesting one if you're into Complex Event Processing and is well worth investigating. 

All in all a good show from TIBCO in '08 and lots of interesting products to keep an eye on throughout '09.