TIBCO Analytics - One Year Later

The past twelve months have been a wild ride in the world of business intelligence and big data, full of acquisitions (including Jaspersoft’s addition to the TIBCO Software family) and innovations. Since forming TIBCO Analytics, we’ve entered an extraordinarily important time for the business and all those customers who’ve placed their trust in us as their partner for data analysis and reporting.   Because of this trust placed in us, and the innovative tools at our disposal as part of TIBCO Software, we have a unique opportunity to deliver best-in-class value with each of our tools.

TIBCO Analytics brings together two market-leading platforms:  TIBCO Spotfire, the award-winning platform for data discovery, analysis and visualization, and TIBCO Jaspersoft, the award-winning platform for embeddable reporting and analysis.  These two platforms solve very different analytics problems and for different types of customers.  Even the very fundamental aspects of these two platforms and the uses for which they are best suited are complementary, which becomes a growing point of emphasis as we aim to deliver increased value for our customers with each product release.

Through the combination of these products and formation of a business unit focused exclusively on Analytics, we have become one of the largest business intelligence tool providers in the industry, and boast one of the largest customer bases as well.  Our significant level of investment in Analytics allows us to solve some of the most important, new analytics problems facing our customers.

We’ll solve these problems through the continued improvement and innovation of both primary platforms (Spotfire and Jaspersoft), and we’ll do so in ways that leverage the strengths of one platform to help the other become more powerful in solving the needs of its core customer.  In other words, we’ll use Jaspersoft-centric features and techniques to help make Spotfire an even more capable data discovery and visualization tool, thereby affordably reaching the broadest possible audience of users, driving greater value in a customer’s investment.

In addition, we’ll use Spotfire-centric features and techniques to help make Jaspersoft an even more capable embedded reporting and analysis tool, enabling more powerful and visual use of data, which also drives greater value in a customer’s investment.

Our longer-term strategy for our Analytics platforms centers on cloud architecture and cloud-based delivery.  Our aim is to literally re-imagine business analytics – the way it is designed, developed, delivered, deployed and consumed – to create a seamless spectrum of web-based analytic services, which can enable anyone to have a personalized or tailored experience that is perfectly fit-for-purpose. It’s an exciting vision and, when we discuss this directly and in more detail with our customers, it never fails to capture their excitement as well.

I look forward to this TIBCO Analytics team describing this vision in more detail for you and then gaining your feedback and engagement so you might join us on this amazing step in the journey toward next-generation data analytics.

The Open Source Renaissance

Note: This blog post also appears as a guest post on the blog at my alma mater, Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. But I also wanted to share it with readers here.

It occurred to me recently that the open source movement is really nothing less than a renaissance. Perhaps that sounds grandiose, but stay with me.

If you think about it, for a few hundred years, some of the most significant advancements by mankind have come from, and are maintained in, proprietary (closed source) methodologies.

Take, for example, U.S. patent and copyright protection laws and policies. They reinforce proprietary, “closed source” rights and policies. As a result of this system, many substantial U.S. companies have formed around breakthrough ideas, but incentives are in place for those companies to guard and protect their intellectual property, even if others outside the company could extend or advance it more rapidly.

Now, to be clear, patent and copyright protection is necessary because it properly encourages the origination of ideas through the notion of ownership. But, too few people consider the upside of allowing others to share in the use of their patents and copyrights, because they think such distribution will dilute their value - when, in fact, sharing can substantially enhance the value. Fundamentally, “open source” is about the sharing of ideas big and small and the modern renaissance represents newfound understanding that sharing creates new value.

In many areas of science, the sharing of ideas (even patents and copyrights) has long been commonplace. The world’s best and brightest physicists, astronomers, geologists, and medical researchers share their discoveries every day. Without that sharing, the advancement of their ideas would be limited to just what they themselves could conjure. By sharing their ideas through published papers, symposiums, and so on, they open up many possibilities for improvements and applications that the originator would have never considered. Of course, the internet has provided an incredible communication platform for all those who wish to collaborate freely and avidly and is, arguably, the foundation for this renaissance.

That’s why it’s ironic that one of the laggard scientific disciplines to embrace open source is computer science. For the past 40 years, for example, incentives have been strong for a company to originate an idea for great software, immediately file a patent and/or register to copyright it, and then guard it religiously. No one would have thought that exposing the inner-workings of a complex and valuable software system so that others might both understand and extend it would be beneficial. Today, however, there are countless examples where openness pays off in many ways. So, why has computer science and software lagged in the open source renaissance?

That computer science is an open source laggard is ironic because the barriers to entry in the software industry are relatively low, compared to other sciences. One might think that low entry barriers would reduce the risk to and promote the sharing of ideas. But, instead, software developers (and companies) have spent most of the last 40 years erecting other barriers, based on intellectual capital and copyright ownership - which is perplexing because it so limits the advancement of the software product. But, such behavior does fit within the historical understanding of business building (i.e., protecting land, labor and capital).

Another relative laggard area - and an interesting comparison - is pharmaceuticals and drug discovery. When I talk with colleagues about this barrier-irony phenomenon, this is the most common other science cited (i.e., another science discipline that has preferred not to share). But, in drug discovery the incentives not to share are substantial because the need to recover the enormous research costs through the ownership of blockbuster drugs is extremely high. In fact, because the barriers to enter the pharmaceuticals industry are quite high, one might think that would promote openness and the sharing of ideas, given that few others would genuinely be able to exploit them. But, once again, the drive to create a business using historically consistent methods has limited the pharmaceuticals industry to closed practices.

So, returning to computer science and software, maybe the reasons for not sharing are based on the complexity of collaboration? That is, it’s hard to figure out someone else’s software code, unless it’s been written with sharing fundamentally in mind. Or maybe there’s a sense that software is art, and I want to protect my creative work - more like poetry than DNA mapping.

Either way, the renaissance is coming for the software industry. Software will advance and solve new problems more quickly through openness and sharing. In this sense, computer science has much to learn from the other areas of science where open collaboration has been so successful for so long.

Fortunately, the world of software is agile and adept. According to research by Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle at SAP Research Labs, during the past five years the number of open source software projects and the number of lines of open source software code have increased exponentially. The principles that this new breed of open source software have forged are already leaving an indelible mark on the industry. Soon, its proponents believe, all software companies will embrace these fundamental open source principles: collaboration, transparency and participation. The course of this renaissance will be our guide.

I would be interested in your feedback on these ideas because the open source renaissance is well underway and I plan to be a model historian.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft