Neeraj Shaabi, Managing Director & Regional Vice President Asia, TIBCO Software, talks about the business opportunity in Indian market and the company’s strategy to grow here. In conversation with Heena Jhingan
Tell us about the work that TIBCO is doing in India.
TIBCO has been serving customers in India for almost 10 years. We engage with organisations where we feel there is sufficient scale and complexity for our technology to come in and solve some really tough problems – banks, telecommunication providers, transportation, etc. Reliance Communications was one of our first success stories in India. For them we solved the complex problem of dealing with customer churn and improving revenue earning from the prepaid subscriber business. Companies are scaling both vertically (adding customers and revenue) as well as horizontally (by acquisitions at home and abroad). When consumers have become more discerning, the enrichment of consumer experience is the key to success. We are in a position to provide lot of values in these areas. Also, with a pro-business government in place, we are bullish about our ability to develop new solutions to meet the challenging needs of the businesses in the country.
Business Intelligence is now being married to every vertical and is getting very innovative. What innovations does TIBCO bring to the table in this space?
The traditional business intelligence market place is facing severe challenge today. Almost every industry player is talking about big data, but you really have to understand this at a deeper level and see how it gets manifested in the form of a real strategy for the company. We think out of the three dimensions of Big Datavolume, variety and velocity. It is velocity that is most interesting. Volume and variety are inevitable and there is little you can do about them other than ensuring robust ways to store, curate and access the data. If you can see, capture, understand and analyse data while things are happening, it has a far greater impact to your overall responsiveness than if you do this after the fact.
What is your view of India as a cloud market?
India is a rapidly emerging market for cloud. Some people tell me it is behind the West. In reality, the issues and challenges here with respect to an accelerated adoption for cloud are not really that different compared to anywhere else. Most of the questions are around regulatory, data privacy, resilience, and related issues. Entire world is grappling with these issues. We can add some unique value in each of the areas we play in. For example, integration in the cloud is something we do quite uniquely – in the new enterprise context, you will inevitably end up with multiple applications being consumed as a service in the cloud – so just like traditional IT required an ESB or SOA reference architecture, how are you going to figure out integration across these providers in the cloud.
What are the areas that TIBCO? cloud solution can tap in India?
We provide the industry’s best integration to some of the top cloud enterprise platforms – such as Salesforce and others. We also offer hybrid capabilities so that businesses can at will determine which parts of their enterprise infrastructure should be a service, and which should be on assets on premises. I believe, we offer industry? strongest analytics capabilities – with TIBCO Spotfire – as a cloud service. The latest additions to our Spotfire product line have introduced some innovative capabilities such as analytics recommendation engine to simplify the complex process of data aggregation, visualisation and analysis.
Government is an upcoming vertical. What are your plans to get business from this segment in India?
We work selectively with governments, and in some well defined sectors. For example in the US, we help the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies with their cyber security needs. Our Fast Data platform helps organisations like Interpol to quickly detect patterns in anomalies as part of their security and surveillance initiatives. In some countries like Singapore, we help the financial institutions of government, such as the tax office, central banks etc. to automate their processes. We have much the same opportunities in India. As a case in point, we do work for the Indian Railways and that work embodies some of the aforesaid differentiatorsscale, complexity and speed.
