Published on the 11/08/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
‘Digital reinvention’ demands more integration, intelligence…
Integration software specialist Tibco has announced a shift in focus – away from a mainly core systems focused integration play, and instead looking to work with companies integrating newer technologies “at the edge” of their organisations that reach out to customers or connect with internet of things devices.
The company is also seeking to boost its profile in the data analytics arena; these shifts in its focus were made clear at its recent TibcoNow conference in Las Vegas.
In Australia this week, the company’s CEO Murray Rode, said this was particularly important for organisations which were digitally reinventing themselves.
He said that as enterprise captured more and more data – from sensors or customers – it would need to deploy “augmented intelligence and machine learning applications” in order to automate business decisions and actions as there was simply too much data to handle manually.
Rode said that companies needed to pay as much attention to integrating the systems at the edges of their infrastructure as to core platforms.
But Australian Stock Exchange CIO Tim Thurman, a long time user of Tibco software, explained that it was important to ensure that integration efforts between systems did not create a new problem.
Thurman said that the ASX was one of the few international exchanges that was vertically integrated. He said that in a bid to integrate all its different platforms the ASX had developed hundreds of customised APIs. “It was like a spiderweb of data going everywhere,” said Thurman, speaking at a media event organised by Tibco in Sydney.
This injected delay and problems he said. “The continuous problems with APIs is that they need data. If that is not properly scheduled then the data will not get there at the right time.”
That had led to innovation challenges as every time something new had been introduced the ASX had to perform a complete systems regression test, to check the interdependencies.
He acknowledged that in the past the Exchange had underestimated the amount of work involved in achieving effective integration and managing data transport among platforms, but said it was now taking a different approach.
He said that the ASX was mid-way through a five year refresh initiative that would see the deployment of a Tibco enterprise wide service bus that would streamline the flow of data, help address scheduling issues and make the ASX more efficient.
Thurman said that the ASX also wanted to develop a data strategy that would allow it to become more proactive and predictive.
