Super Bowl-bound 49ers Make Game-time Decisions On and Off the Field

January 31, 2013 by 1 Comment
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Roger CraigThree-time 49ers Super Bowl champion, four-time Pro Bowl player, First-Team All-Pro and NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year in 1988 – running back Roger Craig knows the importance of being able to make real-time decisions on and off the field. In that 1988 season, he rushed for a career-high 1,502 yards, made 76 receptions and scored double-digit touchdowns.

Three years earlier, in 1985, he led the NFL in receptions, a feat that had never been accomplished before by a running back. That same year he was also the first player in league history to record 1,000 rushing and 1,000 receiving yards in the same season. How did he do it? By understanding, anticipating, and acting on plays and events just moments before they occurred – to score the winning touchdown.

“My belief in the two-second advantage grows constantly stronger because I witness its success, both on and off the field. Training HARD in the off-season gave me my two-second advantage with the 49ers. When my opponents got weaker as the game and the season wore on, I just got stronger. My body wouldn’t get tired because my mind was strong. This strength was stored in my mental database and was impossible to erase. The team this year will have success if they believe in the Harbaugh system. They need to study the Ravens, know their assignment, know their alignment and execute. That will be their two-second advantage. It’s going to be a great game.”

- Roger Craig, Three-time Super Bowl Champion, and TIBCO VP of Business Development  [Read more...]

Filed Under: general, Social, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Integration #FAIL – Part 3: Lacking a Common Language Across Your Enterprise

January 31, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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TranslateLearning a new language gives you access to a whole new world, lets you grow closer to people and cultures, and have experiences that you never had before. Without knowing the local language, you might be able to meet your essential needs in that culture, but you would be stuck when it comes to communicating at a higher level.

Integration is the Universal Language

Business systems are much the same. Because each business application has its own language and style of communicating, information becomes trapped in business and application silos. The information needed to have an end-to-end view of an enterprise is somewhere between difficult and impossible to find.

Integration of applications is like solving the problem of communicating across human cultures and generations. Applications need a common language to prevent chaos and lost opportunity. Fortunately, there’s a time-tested solution: SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) interfaces are the translators that make each application speak a common language so that messaging and other integration applications can bring together people with the information they need. [Read more...]

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Trade Processing in One Second is Like Not Answering Email for Two Weeks

January 30, 2013 by 3 Comments
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The high-speed financial services industry (FSI) can’t deal in seconds or even milliseconds.  That would be far too slow.  Processing a trade in one second would be like taking two weeks off, not telling anybody, and not touching your email.  When dealing with stock prices that fluctuate in real time, any delay can mean the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.  This means the trades that really matter in the financial services world need to move in one millionth of a second (10-6) and technology “pipes” need to carry an incredible amount of data.

Speed is all that matters

For Citihub, an FSI IT provider, performance is absolutely paramount for their clients.  If it’s faster, Citihub wants it because their customers need it.  If technology isn’t even a thousandth of a second faster than the latest version, they don’t want to hear about it.  They want to know how quickly a message can get from point to point, whether it’s trades, market data, or any piece of useful financial information.  Bottom line: it needs to travel unnaturally fast.

Citihub provides consulting services and technology infrastructure to serve their clients in technically complex and business critical environments.  Citihub searched for a faster messaging solution for their clients’ high-volume, low-latency trading needs and that search ended with TIBCO. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Structure No Longer Has a Vote on What’s Data or Not

January 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Not so long ago, businesses didn’t care about information outside the normal structure of trusted outlets like print media, trade journals, academic research and other trusted system-generated information. In fact, I would go so far as saying that if it wasn’t structured, it wasn’t data. All of this changed soon after customers started to freely express their comments and opinions on websites and bulletin boards. Views became another data point to track and analyze to harness customer preference as an aggregate and per each individual. In some ways, unstructured customer data via connectivity and social media has multiplied the already growing challenge of big data.

Unstructured data now matters

Now businesses thrive or fail on what these un-controlled, unstructured data sources say. From retailers to job sites, what unstructured data says about a business and brand matters. Businesses don’t control unstructured data sources, and this scares them. But, just like structured data sources, business can ingest, understand, react, and even anticipate what’s going to happen if they are clever.  The speed and pace at which unstructured data sources spread has increased due to the nature of the Internet and global connectivity. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Financial Sector Faces Financial Crisis

January 28, 2013 by 1 Comment
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Banks have a need to embrace regulation and compliance as a way to regain the public’s credibility and to earn back the trust of the large investors.

Ups and downs

The financial sector has had its ups and downs. Once it was declared, “Banks are too big to fail” in 2008, the “bank problem” was thought by some to be decided. However, in 2010 the Occupy protests gained sympathy when railed against saving such large financial organizations for what many saw as self-inflicted wounds. The public was somewhat mollified when most of the banks paid back the money from the bailouts. Nevertheless, still today people offer up their complaints, arguments and protests.. No matter what side of the aisle it comes from, a flurry of opinions fill the Internet, newspapers, and bulletin boards every day.

Now we have a different form of protest that is not being fought with picket signs, but perhaps the strongest tool of all — silence. Big investors have recently made feelings known (and voices heard) with their wallets and are putting their money into new ventures. Interestingly, shareholders selling their stakes in companies have tripled since 2008, creating new millionaires but that cash has not found its way into the financial services industry. The biggest fish are swimming somewhere else. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Social Grows Up In The Workplace

January 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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There’s a party happening today on more than 1.5 million PCs, laptops and mobile devices worldwide as tibbr celebrates its second birthday.  No, that wasn’t a typo — tibbr is the name of a social networking platform for enterprises — think of it as an internal, secure, company-wide Facebook for the enterprise.  With 1.5 million paid users in more than 104 countries, it’s been cited as the industry’s fastest growing collaborative technology with the broadest scope of functionality at work in enterprises today.

To put this in perspective, think back to the early days of the Internet, when the term “Web Years” was a common term. It meant the length of time it takes for Internet technology to evolve as much as non-web technology develops in a calendar year, commonly thought to be about two months, thus equating a Web year to six standard years.

Fast forward two decades later and we find the meteoric rise of new Web-based developments make Web Years as relevant as ever.  Witness how the Internet of Things, 4GL mobile Web apps, GPS-enabled everything, and social computing for the workplace are transforming markets, politics and global social movements at incredible speeds.

So tibbr and its enterprise social siblings are really reaching adolescence in Web Years.  And just as some early teenagers sprout up and mature much faster than others into productive members of society, only a few of these social platforms are truly mature and enterprise-ready, delivering solid returns on investment for their users and companies. [Read more...]

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A Look Back: Vivek Ranadivé and TIBCO

January 25, 2013 by 3 Comments
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At the age of 17, with just two months worth of money in his pocket, Vivek Ranadivé left his home in Bombay for the United States. He dreamed of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after watching a documentary in India years earlier. He was able to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree from MIT in Electrical Engineering, and later an MBA from Harvard.

Once out of school, Ranadivé decided to start his own information technology company. Disappointed in the inefficiencies in software development as compared to hardware, he developed technology that would deliver electronic information to users in real time through a centralized bus. He became “Mr. Real Time” when he first built “The Information Bus,” or TIB, a software version of the staple computer bus concept for hardware.

With a prototype TIB under construction, Ranadivé put his business degree from Harvard to use and sought start-up capital in northern California. He received seed capital from Teknekron Corp in 1985 and Teknekron Software Systems Inc. (TSS) was born. Ranadivé turned to faculty at MIT and hired talented staff from nearby Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

TSS found initial success creating software infrastructure that integrated and delivered market data to trading rooms at Goldman Sachs and then many large banks and other financial organizations. Teknekron created the “trading floor of the future,” eventually digitizing all of Wall Street.

For more on Vivek Ranadivé and how vision became a reality, watch this short YouTube biography.

Filed Under: Real Time With Vivek Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Integration #FAIL – Part 2: Lying in the Path of an Oncoming Bus

January 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Point-to-point integration can be a quick fix for getting information from system to system. All it takes is a bit of code and voilà – connection complete!

But what happens when the programmer who wrote the script falls off the face of the planet? Inevitably, a change will be submitted by the business. Just how long will it take to find the keys that unlock the black box?

A single instance might be manageable but if you’re like most organizations, dozens of hard-coded, point-to-point interfaces run beneath the surface of application development projects.

And chances are, developers used different technologies over the years, making it difficult to know where issues lie, let alone what could be causing a problem.

It could take an army to overcome a situation like this on a larger scale, not to mention escalated cost. So the question becomes: how much of your business’ agility and resources are you willing to put at risk? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration, SOA Tagged With: , , , , ,

Caesars Makes Them Happy Even When They Don’t Win

January 23, 2013 by 1 Comment
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Every business has customers, even if they seem to pretend they don’t. There is always an end-user who has to deal with the products you build or services you provide. And you likely have information, perhaps an unmanageable amount, on their preferences. From billing history, to usage habits, to loyalty data – you are already keeping track of your customers’ experiences. Yet, how are you actively managing customer experiences and expectations?

“In the context of the 21st century, we believe in engaging, interacting and predicting customer behavior.”

- Rizwan Patel, Director of IT, Caesars Entertainment

Companies like Caesars Entertainment can’t afford not to invest in the customer experience.  In terms of customers, the stakes can’t be any higher than in the casino gaming industry.  Unhappy customers seem to be an inherent part of the mechanics of gambling.  How do you keep customers happy when they are statistically proven to be handing your money more often than not?  Caesars had to create an entertaining experience around losing money and have succeeded so much that customers are happy to lose again and again and keep coming back. The thrill of the possibility to win, while surrounded by an entertaining atmosphere makes the risks worth taking and maybe even enjoyable to lose. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration, Loyalty Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Meeting Your Customers Where They Are, Anytime, Anywhere

January 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Meeting Your CustomerMany made predictions as 2013 kicked off, but one caught my eye. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick called this new year the Year of Digital Business. As Fenwick points out, there has been a communications evolution that has many retailers scrambling to find ways to get closer to their customers with innovative new technology to beat the competition.

Customer Experience Management

There are a few names for this trend like digital experience management and digital customer experience, but the one that seems to be sticking is customer experience management, or CEM. Fenwick explains it this way:

As we move into 2013, we’re seeing an increased focus from our clients on customer experience. As mobile, social, cloud, and big data come together we see the emergence of digital business strategy: the ability to leverage digital technologies to transform the customer value equation and drive competitive advantage. The challenge for most will be to keep up with the pace of change.

This is a call to action for both technologists and marketers, which requires new levels of cooperation across traditional silos. Fenwick’s assertion challenges us to decide the scope of CEM, as it touches so many aspects of technology and process, that include (but are not limited to): location, inventory, transaction history, offers, omni-channel, and loyalty. This may look like a daunting list, but in reality, there are ways to start small and build on existing infrastructure to allow quick successes. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration, Loyalty, Mobility, Retail Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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