Interview with Robert Eve, Senior Director of Data Management at TIBCO Software

As the information age matures, data has become the most valuable resources for enterprises. Today, organizations are putting data at the centre of their decision-making processes to drive exceptional business value. In an interview, Robert (Bob) Eve, Senior Director of Data Management Thought Leadership at TIBCO Software reveals how the growth in big data has created a huge market for data analytics tools that help enterprises seamlessly implement big data solutions.

Please brief us about the products and services you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it?

TIBCO helps organizations augment the intelligence of every person, system, and device in their ecosystem by interconnecting them with virtually all data sources and analytic capabilities needed to generate new insights, sharing them in real-time for better decisions and automated actions that drive business efficiencies and results.
TIBCO's analytics and data management specific portfolio includes the following products:

• TIBCO Spotfire® provides advanced, self-service visualization
• TIBCO Jaspersoft® powers embedded analytics and reporting applications
• TIBCO® Data Science lets organizations collaborate, operationalize, and scale machine learning
• TIBCO® Streaming analyzes and acts on IoT devices and other streaming data in real time
• TIBCO® Data Virtualization provides agile data access and delivery at enterprise scale
• TIBCO EBX™ lets organizations govern shared data assets such as master and reference data consistently
• TIBCO SnappyData delivers a unified analytics data fabric that enhances analytics, data science, streaming, and data management

Kindly share your point of view on the current scenario of big data analytics and its future.

Let me first decompose big data and analytics. Today, big data is just data. Just ask IDC, who recently updated their Global Datasphere Forecast. Organizations need to scale their data infrastructure quickly or risk missing out on the digital transformation opportunities enabled by these data assets. TIBCO, along with trusted partners, is smoothing that transformation on the infrastructure side. TIBCO offerings such as TIBCO Data Virtualization and TIBCO EBX can be combined to provide broad access, with the right level of governance, so that businesses can take advantage of all their data assets.

On the analytics side, the most significant shift is "analytics everywhere" with employees of all stripes building analytical skills, enabled by easier to use visualization and data science tools such as TIBCO Spotfire and TIBCO Data Science. In a world where data scientists are scarce, arming 100 times more knowledge workers is the only way businesses can deliver the analytics required to drive meaningful results.

Now, fast forward three to five years. Twice the data, if not more. And with the exception of private and regulated data, all of it is easily accessible by everyone across your organization, and likely many of your suppliers and customers. Further, by then, every employee will be "citizen" data scientist, each skilled at developing the kinds of insights and transformations needed to effectively compete in a world where data and analytics are ubiquitous.

Source: IDC, How New Technology Is Accelerating the Benefits of Digital Transformation, Doc # DR2019_BS5_RP_MM , March 2019

How is the big data/AI industry changing? What are some of the key technology transformations in this space?

Big data and AI are becoming easier as vendor solutions have greatly lessened the need for specialist experts. For example, big data has become far easier to use, with technologies such as Data Virtualization providing a common SQL-oriented interface that hides big data's complexity and provides consistent methods across any data source, not just big data. AI algorithms have been commoditized. Now, a premium is on the agile data science DataOps management technology that speeds time-to-solution and works for any algorithm. In addition, AI itself is helping make AI work better. For example, it can provide smart recommendations on which datasets and algorithms are likely to produce the best results.

How does your company facilitate the transformation of an enterprise?

To succeed in the digital economy, it's not enough to connect your systems, organization, and ecosystem. TIBCO helps augment intelligence by making all data available for analysis, gaining new AI-fueled insights into critical business processes. This transformation allows organizations to create new, disruptive business models, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and optimize operations.

What are the business benefits of handling data analytics and implementing a real-time decisioning platform?

There are lots of immediate customer engagement, operational improvement, and innovation acceleration wins as these advanced data and analytics technologies are adopted. In aggregate, the impacts are staggering. According to a recent IDC study (Driving Success in Emerging Tech and DX Survey, IDC, August, 2018) more advanced adopters see 2.7x reduction in operational costs, 2.4x more new products and services, 2x increase in profits, and 1.5x increase in customer satisfaction over less advanced organizations.

Not just 2-3% more, 2-3 times the benefit! How else can you get that kind of ROI?

Source: IDC, How New Technology Is Accelerating the Benefits of Digital Transformation, Doc # DR2019_BS5_RP_MM , March 2019

How can businesses efficiently extract the value from data, without increasing cost and complexity?

That's an easy question for me since I wrote a book about how ten businesses were using data virtualization to gain more value from their data, and doing so with less cost and greater agility. It is called Data Virtualization: Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achieve Business Agility. Data virtualization uses lightweight middleware and metadata to access, transform, and deliver data for any analytic or application need, without the extra copies of data and overhead associated with data warehouses and ETL. As the value of data continues to rise and the complexity of distributed sources such as big data, cloud, IoT, etc., continues to grow, data virtualization demand has exploded, with Gartner calling it the fastest growing segment in data integration today.

About Author:

Robert (Bob) Eve, Senior Director of Data Management Thought Leadership at TIBCO Software. Bob joined TIBCO when the Cisco Data Virtualization business was acquired in November 2017. Bob helped define the data virtualization category and co-authored the first book on Data Virtualization, Data Virtualization: Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achieve Business Agility. Bob has held executive leadership roles at Oracle, PeopleSoft, Mercury Interactive and more, spanning product development, alliances, business development, and marketing. Bob holds an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a BS with Honors from the University of California, Berkeley.