Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor directs campaign, industry and customer marketing at TIBCO. He flew for the US Navy before finding a home in technology 19 years ago. An avid outdoorsman, Chris is also passionate about technology and innovation and speaks frequently about creating great business outcomes at industry events. As well as being a contributor for The TIBCO Blog, Chris maintains his personal blog at successfulworkplace.com as well as contributing to the Harvard Business Review blog.


Cloud Integration Needs to be Better, Faster and Cheaper

May 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Massimo PezziniGartner’s Massimo Pezzini spoke this morning at the AADI Conference in London on the topic of why integration is even more critical in the ever-expanding world of cloud computing. Pezzini started out by commenting that application integration was a science that we were finally beginning to master just as the game changed with the arrival of cloud computing. With this game change comes new realities and consequences for cloud services integration (CSI) that Pezzini laid out as follows:

Realities

  • Your organization plays in one or more “virtual enterprises”
  • Cloud services (e.g. SaaS) hold some of your data
  • Cloud services manage “chunks” of some of your business processes
  • Your application portfolio will include both on-premise and cloud apps

Consequences

  • You wil have to increasingly share data with your partners and participate in their business processes (and vice versa)
  • Your data will be fragmented across cloud and on-premise
  • Your end-to-end processes will span cloud and on-premise

He followed up this foundation for his discussion with what he described as the three key issues facing businesses looking to integrate cloud and on-premise applications: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Integration Tagged With: , , , , ,

Gartner on Building Big Data Solutions

May 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Ian Finley of GartnerGartner’s Ian Finley spoke this afternoon at the 2013 Gartner AADI Conference in London. In what was a primer on Big Data, Finley predicted that there will be 4.4 million jobs in Big Data by 2015, but only a third of those positions will be filled due to a lack of resources in the labor market. He used that prediction to emphasize the value of first understanding the business need for a Big Data solution and formulation of solid use cases.

Finley provided examples of common Big Data opportunities that Gartner is seeing:

  • Public sector: real-time monitoring of traffic flows, vehicle locations, resource use
  • Public safety: Forecasting the extend and impact of natural and man-made disasters as well as surveillance
  • Utilities: Understanding individual use patterns and improving demand management
  • Retail: Web and e-commerce by analysis of clickstream and customer feedback. Providing faster and more accurate customer responses.

Finley referred to retail as the most popular use case and said that it attracts the greatest number of resources and publicity. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration, Tech Trends Tagged With: , ,

Gartner AADI and Dragging Your Technology Past Into the Future

May 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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luggage full and ready to travelGartner’s AADI Conference kicked off this morning at the Park Plaza in London with the keynote Gartner Keynote: Integrate the Past. Embrace the Present. Shape the Future delivered by Gartner’s Andy Kyte and David Mitchell Smith. Kyte and Smith talked about the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information) that is driving both change and uncertainty. They framed their conversation against the skills and assets that organizations bring from their past, but also about the technology and process “baggage.” To move forward, they said, “…organizations must not just integrate legacy but also do so in a way that minimizes dependencies on legacy thinking.”
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Integration, Mobility, Social Tagged With: ,

Forget the “Big” in Big Data and Just Consider the Data – InterOp Las Vegas

May 9, 2013 by 1 Comment
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Sometimes, just sometimes, what happens in Las Vegas shouldn’t stay in Las Vegas. That was clearly the case this week when TIBCO CTO Matt Quinn took the stage to talk about the myths and realities of Big Data. In Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich or Pretty, Quinn provided his perspective on Big Data based on years of experience in some of the biggest data environments around, like FedEx, Nielsen, and others.

Forget the ‘big’ part for a moment, think about variety

Quinn pointed out that most customers are not struggling with ‘big’ data but are instead still struggling with data. In Quinn’s view, it is the complex interactions between customer data sets that cause the majority of the issues. Success depends more on piecing together different data sets across wildly different applications and systems, with variety of data being the key.

In Quinn’s opinion, solving this data ‘jigsaw puzzle’ is often overlooked and tools like Hadoop, while clearly in focus, is just one tool in the toolbelt and can be a clumsy tool when dealing with real-life complexity.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cloud Makes Anyone and Everyone a Robber Baron

May 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Just a few short years ago, even some of the smartest visionaries went on the record dismissing cloud. But times change and so have their opinions. Even cloud’s most vocal opponents are starting to realize that cloud computing offers something entirely new: the ability for even the smallest player to scale up an idea with little capital and at the lowest operational cost possible. This is a complete reversal of the concepts that have driven the world since industrialization began.

The robber barons

The robber barrons of the 19th century amassed their wealth by gradually building out massive real estate, fur, steel, finance, railroad and later, oil monopolies. They crushed their competitors by out-sizing them, making competition impossible by the sheer cost of starting up a rival business. In Newport, Rhode Island last week, my wife and I strolled the Cliff Walk with our daughter and marveled at the remarkable mansions that face the sea, testaments to the incredible fortunes amassed by the people who’s names we still know as universities, like Duke, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Carnegie, and Stanford. They rightly saw the business world in terms of capital investment and scale. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Playing Trains as an Adult is about Big Data

April 10, 2013 by 2 Comments
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union-pacific-locomotiveWhen you think of railroads, do you think of high tech? Maybe you’re like many who think of trains as a quaint, lingering sign of a simpler time. Rusted iron meets rusted iron.

The reality is that railroads are a far cry from the business of even a few years ago and require a serious back-end of integrated systems to deal with the massive amounts of data produced and consumed today. Railroads are as much a big data and integration story as retail.

Technology and trains

While their paths may be predetermined by rails and switches, there are a host of other factors that affect the value proposition of running a railway. From the planning phase to actually under way on the tracks, these factors show up as events that need to feed both automated and human decision-making. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Integration, Transportation and Logistics Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Your Customers are More Powerful than Your Company

March 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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“The lack of good integration is a barrier to succeed in this world. Integration is now interconnection.” Those were the words of Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst John Rymer in a recent webinar on strategy for integration of cloud initiatives.

“We’re in the age of the customer. Which means that in order to be successful, whether you’re a for-profit business or a public agency trying to serve your citizens better, whoever it is, those are your customers. They’re very empowered and often have better technology than we do. In order for us to succeed we have to serve them, empower them and understand them, and that need takes integration to the next level.”

Hiding complexity while creating great experiences

Rymer cites several examples of how different companies are linking what were traditional back-office functions to services that directly face their customers through their mobile devices. This goes further than transactions or information and involves creating whole environments to interact with customers in real time in a way that is a great experience.

His use of the word “interconnection” means linking together systems that reach down to the core of application design, extend across business networks, yield awareness and ‘smarts’ while being able to secure and manage the lot. Traditional point-to-point integration won’t manage this level of interconnectedness.

Technologists and business owners need to accept what’s coming as these systems are linked:

  • Your message volumes will explode
  • Your architecture will be different
  • You will need a second lifecycle
  • You will design business services
  • You will learn new application-design patterns

“You still have Web.” When Rymer makes this statement, it becomes clear how far we’ve come and how much is changing. Who thought we’d ‘still have Web’ just a few years ago? What’s coming next?

For more, watch these webinars featuring analysts from Forrester Research and TIBCO on integration.

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

Here Comes the Chief Information Integration Officer

March 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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We have an overflowing abundance of information in the world. We’ve been computerizing and digitizing everything under the sun for decades. When that wasn’t enough, we put all that data online when the Internet arrived. And it continued to grow and became “big” and then really, really “big.”

But throughout all of that remarkable change, a surprising amount of that information never met its neighbors across the database street or on the next application block.

Chief Information Officer

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Early on, we gave a title to the people who managed all of this data… we call them Chief Information Officers and they are a powerful part of every enterprise for good reason. But what if the techniques, technologies and challenges of the times made information by itself not all that meaningful? We’d need to change the title to something more relevant.

Knowing this is true, we have a title that perfectly describes what CIO should really stand for: Chief Integration Officer.

Chief Integration Officer

Data that sits by itself or isn’t married up with relevant information can’t be used to make decisions, avoid risk or capitalize on opportunities. We can only achieve these goals when systems are integrated in a way that allows data to flow, combine, and reveal its patterns to us. We call that capability “integration.”

For further integration-focused information, watch these webinars discussing how you can become the CIO, Chief Integration Officer.

Filed Under: general, Integration Tagged With: , , , ,

Turning Customers into Fans is an Enterprise Game

March 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a significant shift in how, where and when consumers buy. This shift has completely upset the applecart and is changing customer relationship management. The new way of doing business has several names, be it real-time interaction management, customer experience management, digital customer experience, or a host of others. At its root, it comes down to being able to analyze, understand, predict and act on opportunities to engage with customers. Done right, a customer becomes a fan and the loyal 12th man on the business playing field.

Engaging isn’t necessarily a discount, either. Customers won’t become fans simply by giving them offers and trying to sell them something. Powerful engagement, the kind that makes real fans, comes in many forms that include social interaction, loyalty rewards, exclusive content, perhaps gamification, but certainly interaction wherever and whenever the customer chooses. Not only does this involve many different technologies, but it also touches enough disciplines and parts of the organization that marketing now qualifies as an enterprise game.

If today’s marketing is truly enterprise level (and it is, trust me) that means the way to approach turning customers into fans has to be worthy of  the scope of enterprise. It has to serve historical questions as well as the data streams that are happening in real time. It also needs to face the organization as well as the customer’s data needs at the same time. This calls for integration of systems that were previously silo’d and/or unavailable in the moment.

This is why turning customers into fans can’t be solved by a simple point application or offer engine. It takes, to borrow a phrase, a village of integrated data combined with the ability to serve a variety of platforms. More than anything, it has to be responsive to a customer that is undergoing change at least as quickly as technology. Turning Customers into Fans is an enterprise game.

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

Does Work Sometimes Feel Like a Seinfeld Episode?

March 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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There’s a classic episode of the American television show Seinfeld called “The Comeback” where a main character, George Costanza, is in a meeting, eating shrimp as quickly as he can. A coworker quips, “Hey, George, the ocean called and they’re running out of shrimp.” George, caught off guard, has nothing to say. He thinks of a response after the meeting has ended, and becomes obsessed with recreating the moment so he can respond with, “Oh yeah? Well, the jerk store called, and they’re running outta you.” Of course he fails. The true moral to the story becomes, “Once the moment passes, the response loses context and relevance.”

The ability to come up with the best response too late is called l’esprit de l’escalier (staircase wit in English, or colloquially, as a comeback). We’ve all experienced coming up with the best answer after leaving a conversation, already having reached the bottom of the staircase and knowing we can’t go back. We slap our forehead and say, “If only I’d thought of that in time.” Companies that lack integrated systems have their own version of this playing out every day and it has an outsized impact on operational decisions and responses. [Read more...]

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