Application infrastructure software provider TIBCO Software Inc. on Thursday announced a 17% jump in sales in its recently closed first quarter, a spike that the company credited in part to its 2007 acquisition of business intelligence specialist Spotfire.
For the quarter ended March 2, 2008, TIBCO reported revenue of $146.6 million, a 17% gain on the $125.7 million reported in the year-earlier quarter. License revenue showed an 11% improvement to $57.8 million in the quarter, from $52.1 million a year ago. But the real highflier was TIBCO's services and maintenance revenue, which soared 21% to $86.9 million.
Acquisition and other expenses nearly halved TIBCO's net income, which declined to $5.5 million from $10.4 million in the same period a year ago. That translated into per-share net income of $0.03, down from $0.05 in 2007's first quarter.
TIBCO specializes in connecting a company's disparate applications through a services-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows better use of data across the enterprise. Its business lines cover three main areas: SOA technology, business optimization applications, and business process management tools.
In May of last year, the company acquired business intelligence software provider Spotfire for $195 million. In the first quarter of 2008, Spotfire accounted for more than half of the license revenue in TIBCO's business optimization line, adding $8 million to cash flow during the period.
Next week, TIBCO plans to release a version of Spotfire with new capabilities for creating application mashups, a popular subset of the Web 2.0 toolkit.
In contrast to Oracle, which purchased TIBCO's rival, BEA Systems, in January and this week announced weak third-quarter sales performance in the U.S. market, TIBCO singled out the Americas region as one of the stronger contributors to the quarter. The United States accounted for 53% of TIBCO's sales in the quarter, with Europe and Asia-Pacific contributing 38% and 10%, respectively.
TIBCO also said that the deteriorating economic picture on the home front did not affect the company. "We didn't see much impact from the economic environment, either in Q4 or this quarter," said Vivek Ranadivé, TIBCO's CEO, on a conference call to discuss the results.
Future quarters will reveal what effects, if any, the newly reshaped competitive market will have on TIBCO's sales, but for now, TIBCO officials project an air of confidence. "It's good for us because customers want to go to a neutral party," Ranadivé asserted on the call, drawing a distinction between software providers that offer enterprise applications in addition to middleware technology, and TIBCO, which focuses solely on SOA and business optimization applications. The counterargument from the likes of Oracle and SAP is that customers prefer to have "one throat to choke," in the parlance of customers and vendors alike.
Ranadivé said the Oracle/BEA marriage has dovetailed nicely with TIBCO's efforts to build out its sales force.