I missed this in the news cycle on TIBCO acquiring Nimbus, but Theo Priestley of BPM redux posted on the acquisition as well:

And this is where it gets interesting. If you think on it, it’s actually an admission of failure (and of lessons learnt) because both are squarely pitched in the separate worlds of Business and IT. [...]

It’s also interesting because TIBCO had a ‘social’ element to it’s suite with TIBBR, does this mean they think got the social collaboration functionality wrong ?

I think the likely answer is “yes”.

TIBCO has announced its acquisition of Nimbus today:

Nimbus provides a strong complement to TIBCO’s event-enabled infrastructure software platform. Whereas TIBCO has traditionally focused on the automation of data, systems, and processes, Nimbus allows business users to collaboratively describe and document all aspects of a business – from operational best practices to organizational and system models. These are combined with robust governance capabilities that can deliver a process-focused “Intelligent Operations Manual” across the enterprise, linked to supporting data and systems. Nimbus focuses on the vast majority of processes that are often not captured in enterprise applications and automated workflows, and it has found particular traction with business transformation, compliance-led, and continuous improvement initiatives.

On the face of it it seems like a very complementary acquisition – I don’t see a lot of overlap between the market needs Nimbus addresses versus the market needs TIBCO addresses.  This might be seen as a move by TIBCO to inject some more business-friendly DNA into its veins, as right now TIBCO is seen as more of a speeds-n-feeds vendor than a business process management vendor.

Neil Ward-Dutton was first to the presses with his analysis of the buy:

Nimbus is happy to point out that historically it’s had a hard time selling to IT, and this has slowed down sales cycles; part of the challenge for it has been that Control doesn’t fit neatly into any mainstream product category (including BPA). TIBCO can help with the IT selling angle; but it’s important to recognise, too, that Nimbus can potentially give TIBCO a massive leg-up in terms of developing a more business-engaged field sales capability.

It sounds like a good synergistic match.  Neil characterizes Nimbus as a company with “annual revenues of around £10m and around 100 employees” – which implies the purchase price was easily digestible for a company the size of TIBCO.  Still, as we’ve seen with the IBM acquisition of Lombardi, sometimes a small (relatively) acquisition can have an outsized impact on the buyer.

Clay Richardson of Forrester also weighs in on the purchase:

So, why did TIBCO acquire Nimbus?  In many ways this deal is a nod to the “Empowered BT” trend, where more technical capability is being moved into the business.  For vendors like TIBCO, this means building – or buying – functionality that puts business stakeholders in the driver’s seat.  Over the past six months, one of the top inquiry topics I’ve seen from clients is around “models for increasing business engagement within BPM suites”.  In short,  I’ve fielded numerous calls from business stakeholders scratching their heads saying “I wrote the check for this BPM suite, but the IT guys are the only ones that can touch it.”

Empowered BT trend is a great way to sum up with the Nimbus folks (Ian Gotts in particular) have been preaching in their blogs and sales pitches.  Clay wraps up with this note:

TIBCO’s acquisition of Nimbus will be welcomed news to existing TIBCO customers looking to improve business engagement and – if executed effectively – should allow the developer-centric vendor to compete more effectively against more business-oriented players such as Appian and Lombardi  (i.e., IBM BPM 7.5).

I got a chuckle out of the last line.  But Clay is right – TIBCO needed something to help them compete with more business-oriented products on the market – what isn’t clear is whether Nimbus also needed to partner up with someone to keep going (as one person on twitter put it – is the lack of execution for one just as bad as the lack of business-focus for the other?).  I’m looking forward to seeing how well Nimbus is integrated, what role Ian Gotts is taking on, and how the analysts view on this acquisition evolves over the coming weeks.  So far no one is arguing that this is a bad fit… but we’re only a few hours in!

Neil Ward-Dutton and MWD have published a brief piece about TIBCO and ActiveMatrix BPM. There’s a more in-depth assessment available as well, coming down the pike.

A couple highlights from his write-up:

• Revenue was up 25% year-on-year
• License revenue up 32% year-on-year
• Non-GAAP operating profit up 31% year-on-year.

TIBCO is now rapidly approaching $1 billion in annual revenue; and its acquisitions have helped it broaden its market footprint into healthcare, retail and other industries.

But specifically the BPM part of the business doesn’t seem to be standing out (the growth doesn’t look that different from the company as a whole):

Q2 BPM license revenue was 9% of the total $83m; that’s around $7.5m. TIBCO declares that this is up 33% year-on-year – which is a good sign – but I’m guessing that at the moment, the company hasn’t yet seen a return on its very significant redevelopment investment.

From what I understand ActiveMatrix BPM was a “start over” rewrite of their BPM offering… and from what we’re seeing/hearing anecdotally, it is taking acts of heroic proportions to make big deals happen.

Incidentally, wholesale rewrites of a product are rarely the right thing to do.  They open up all the existing customers to re-examine their go-forward choices… and then they have a new, less mature product to go pitch against entrenched competition.  Let’s suppose you build a better mousetrap that scales better (in theory).  Prospect A says “can you show me the three references where it scales to x million transactions per time unit?” and… well you can’t, can you?  It is a new product after all.  And then if you get a customer to buy into it – maybe it scales, maybe it doesn’t.  Scale is just one dimension- there’s feature-fit, UI/UX, production support, etc.  So many unknowns to answer, that the old product had answers for (maybe bad answers, but answers nonetheless).  But, ironically, a company does have to have the courage to rewrite pieces of their software – or to acquire new pieces of software (as Tibco has done).  Sometimes the difference between a product rewrite and a “module” rewrite is one of perspective, but one rule of thumb is that the product is a SKU – something you sell.  A module isn’t sold independently.

I think the move to ActiveMatrix BPM was more problematic than it appeared on the surface. Putting the $7.5M in perspective… if that is up 33% over prior year, they were as low as $5.625M the year before… This is about the scale of pure-play BPM vendors… but TIBCO + Staffware used to be much bigger than those vendors at the time of their merger…  Their momentum seems to have been in the wrong direction… (when I worked for one of those pure-play vendors, we always looked forward to competing against Tibco in a BPM deal cycle…)

A while back, Bruce Silver wrote up another thorough review of a BPM vendor’s offering, and this time it was TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BPM.  There were a couple of nuggets that jumped out at me:

1. TIBCO is pushing task distribution as being separate from process (or orthogonal, you might say).  It is an interesting wrinkle to their product.  I’ve run into a few cases where the “process” presented to me was really a “how to distribute work to the people on this team” problem, rather than how to manage the process or lifecycle of the stuff their working on (which might extend into groups that aren’t part of the same team).  But there have been only a few, relative to the total number of processes I’ve seen.
2. Apparently they borrowed one of the best features of Lombardi Teamworks (now Websphere Lombardi Edition): “The inline preview function allows playback of running forms from within TIBCO Business Studio.   This Lombardi-ish approach is carried forward in page flow modeling as well, using BPMN to describe each step in the page flow… an advantage (in my view) over the programmer-oriented approach of most ‘enterprise-class’ BPMSs.”
3. It sounds like they’ve added performance data tracking that approaches what Lombardi does.  I’ve been surprised that this early differentiator at Lombardi (circa 2004) hasn’t been more widely copied 6 years later.
4. There was another TIBCO BPM product, but I think that’s on the way out based on TUCON coverage.  BPM vendors need to take a page from Neil Ward-Dutton’s blog.  Bring your customers with you.

Thanks again to Bruce for covering all the product releases of note.

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors has written up Tibco’s ActiveMatrix BPM Announcement:

Now of course the next challenge is the execution challenge. Can TIBCO’s field personnel explain and sell ActiveMatrix BPM effectively? Although the company’s European salesforce has always had success selling iProcess Suite as a “standalone” BPM proposition to customers (thanks in part to the UK heritage of Staffware), the company has found this more difficult to do in North America. Here, BPM has been more likely to be sold as an add-on to a SOA infrastructure deal. This is something that TIBCO is going to have to work on.

I can certainly vouch for the characterization of the North American sales efforts.  Back when I was actually supporting BPM software sales on a regular basis, we loved to compete with Tibco.  ActiveMatrix BPM is getting a decent amount of positive press coverage, so it is at least getting a fair hearing, whereas iProcess had already been essentially defined out of the top tier of BPM solutions.

Neil goes on to say:

As I mentioned upfront, ActiveMatrix BPM is definitely TIBCO’s new strategic BPM technology platform – but isn’t the only process management platform that TIBCO has in play; and in fact, iProcess isn’t the end of the story either. TIBCO also supports two other workflow technologies: InConcert and BusinessWorks Workflow. TIBCO has committed that iProcess will continue to be maintained and supported for the foreseeable future: however it’s likely (in my opinion) that InConcert and BusinessWorks Workflow will soon be end-of-lifed.

Looks like IBM isn’t the only one with a surplus of BPM tools in-house…

Earlier in the piece was something curious, especially given the recent discussions around “Social” BPM…

According to TIBCO’s head of BPM product management, “we’re just not seeing demand for social BPM in our customer base right now”. This is interesting: perhaps TIBCO’s customers have different interests than other enterprises.

Neil, you are too kind!  This makes me think they don’t have many BPM customers, aren’t talking to them, or aren’t asking the right questions and then listening. When I see the adoption numbers from Blueprint and Blueworks, and when I listen to people who run SaaS BPM software (Appian, process maker, Signavio), all the data I get tells me that there is quite a bit of demand for social BPM.

Also, Sandy Kemsley has pretty comprehensive coverage of the event.