Matt Quinn, vice-president of product management and strategy at Tibco, works with some of the world’s largest organisations to solve integration woes. At a recent user event, IT Week met him to discuss the challenges they are facing.
ITW: There’s a lot of loose talk about service-oriented architecture
(SOA) but where do you think your customers stand now compared to the promises
being made for SOA?
Quinn: We get people who say they’ve been doing this for 20 years.
Goldman Sachs says, “We have a completely event-driven environment and we don’t
have a problem with governance” but they have very strong IT. For others, it’s
governance that is the real challenge today.
ITW: At the same time they’re being hit by a relatively new challenge
in the shape of datacentre complexity and power management…
Quinn: [Companies such as] Goldman, Microsoft and FedEx are trying brand-new
things [in part] because they are running out of physical space. Five years ago,
people would have thought you were crazy to even think about powering a
datacentre with DC power. I even heard about a company in Amsterdam using a
barge for its datacentre.
ITW: There’s also a big merger-and-acquisition trend. Will that make
an integration and business process management (BPM) specialist like Tibco prey
for broader firms such as IBM or Oracle?
Quinn: One of the reasons people liked Ajax was that it delivered the
richness of a thick client with web economics. It didn’t need a big workforce.
The direct analogy is infrastructure applications designed to take the cost out
of your business. People also want technology to solve a specific business
problem and the ERPs and ECMs have done a good job but they’re table stakes.
Buying a CRM is like trying to buy yourself a strategy. [These applications]
don’t pour through businesses like infrastructure and the whole business
application is becoming more impacted by BPM.
ITW: So, like IBM, you prefer to keep out of applications and zero in
on infrastructure and process control?
Quinn: IBM is our biggest competitor but they haven’t bought an ERP or a CRM and
I suspect [that is] for the same reasons as Tibco. The next series of
applications will be from the customer and based on BPM. BPM today is like the
Wild West and it may be Oracle [that consolidates activity] but it’s hard for
Oracle [because] nobody loves Oracle.
ITW: How do you see the role of virtualisation?
Quinn: Virtualisation at the top end of the BPM stack has customers pretty
excited. Before it was the engineers and network people talking about the
service-level agreement side of BPM. Now, there’s potential convergence between
SOA and BPM and it’s hard to sell BPM on its own. That’s getting IT excited
because it needs a way to sell infrastructure [to the board] and the answer is
BPM.
ITW: What are the current roadblocks to adoption of virtualisation,
SOA, BPM and other up-and-coming trends?
Quinn: Metering and performance management at the infrastructure layer. In the
past, companies would acquire software licences and cross-charge to divisions
and that was a good way to keep cost controls in place. Today you’re providing
services to a division [so hard metrics are needed]. You see business and IT
misalignment and [that’s why] people are starting to talk about governance at a
much higher level, the whole aspect of operational control.
The other thing is usability and user experience. Enterprise IT software, if it hasn’t already, will soon reach a critical mass of complexity where no one architect can fully architect an end-to-end system. In terms of what the end-user sees, there is a consumer analogy. I had pre-iPod machines that had way more functionality but I now have an iPod because I feel I’m in control of the device rather than the device being in control of me.
About Matt Quinn
Matt Quinn is vice-president of product management and strategy at Tibco
Software.
Tibco is a software infrastructure giant focused on SOA and BPM deployment.
Quinn works with blue-chip organisations on integration projects.
