TIBCO Software, a player in business integration applications, extended itself into the business intelligence space earlier this week with its $195 million all-cash purchase of Spotfire, Inc.
Spotfire has built its business on providing tools that quickly deliver brand and market analysis to corporate decision makers. Its business intelligence offerings include the DecisionSite suite, which enables researchers, engineers, and analysts — predominantly in the life sciences, energy, and manufacturing industries — to visualize real-time data analysis.
The company's DXP offerings also deliver business intelligence, but its target users are sales and brand managers and market researchers. DXP Professional targets line-of-business users, while DXP Enterprise Player extends interaction with the data findings to executives and business managers.
In a statement announcing the deal, TIBCO Chairman and CEO Vivek Ranadivé said, "The combination of Spotfire's next-generation BI capabilities with TIBCO's real-time infrastructure will successfully transform the way customers can interact with data to offer a complete and contextual picture for making truly informed decisions."
The acquisition is expected to close in TIBCO's fiscal third quarter, which ends in September.
TIBCO will add Spotfire's reported 800 customers to its base of 3,000. In the manufacturing arena, Spotfire targets the life sciences, energy, semiconductor, and consumer packaged goods markets. Among its customers are AMD, BASF, General Electric, Pfizer, Saab, and Texas Instruments.
TIBCO has a long history in the field of applications integration, and is one of the few such companies to have avoided being acquired. Since its 1997 founding as a stand-alone company dedicated to enterprise application integration (EAI) — prior to which it was part of Teknekron Software Systems, a provider of information service bus tools — TIBCO has steadily increased its capabilities in business process integration and management.
Since the emergence of the service-oriented architecture concept, the company has been working its way up the SOA stack as the industry has evolved and competitors have emerged. Today, simply providing the tools of the trade mdash; the middleware that allows applications, or services, to be shared by various processes mdash; is not enough for most vendors, according to Bob Mick, vice president of enterprise architecture at analyst firm ARC Advisory. The demand now is for complementary tools, such as business process management and business intelligence, all offered as an integrated package to manufacturers and other businesses.
"[TIBCO's] competition has gotten very intense from the likes of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, for example, all of which have tended to build out complete technology platforms," Mick explained. The Spotfire acquisition could improve TIBCO's position against these providers, he said.
Oracle, which offers its own SOA- and business process integration-based products, made a strong move into business intelligence with its March acquisition of Hyperion Solutions for $3.3 billion.
In fact, for software providers that deal in data management, the BI space is a natural fit, Mick said. "The technology infrastructure has been growing more and more into the applications area, providing that kind of general-purpose capability."
Since TIBCO's technology already handled the data at the core of a business, capping that off with applications that make sense of the data, as Spotfire's products do, makes sense, according to Mick. "This is one of those things that goes off in the direction of how well you use it once you get it aggregated or federated or whatever else you want to do with it."
And TIBCO's mantra of event-driven data management, he said, also gives it a strong play among potential industrial customers. "In our world, the manufacturing world, that plays pretty well," Mick said.