One of the best aspects of working in technology is getting a front-row seat to continuous innovation. That’s part of why I was excited to attend the “What’s New and What’s Next for TIBCO® Data Virtualization” session at our recent TIBCO NOW event.
But I wasn’t the only one jazzed to learn about new capabilities available today, as well as exciting new features coming down the road. After the session, I reached out to two TIBCO Data Virtualization experts at TIBCO partner Accenture, Vanniarajan Chidhambaram, and Genware Computer Systems, Sherlock Holmes, to hear about what they thought was “cool” about the recent TIBCO Data Virtualization 8.3 release and the roadmap of new capabilities that will soon follow.
Show Me The Money!
When it comes to product innovation, I like to get our partners’ perspectives. Experts at helping their clients apply technology solutions to business challenges, partners look at new capabilities “through the lenses of their clients.” They ask tough questions on their clients’ behalf. For instance:
- How will this new capability impact my client’s as-is and future architectures?
- Will it be easy to train my clients on how they can use the new capability?
- And the “show me the money” question: how will these technological advancements translate into tangible business advancements?
What’s New and Next for my Accenture Energy and Utility Clients
Here is what Vanniarajan, an experienced data architect who typically works with Energy and Utility clients, shared with me:
“We are seeing two common trends among Energy and Utility clients, delivering operational needs (optimizing current people, processes, and technologies) and innovation at scale (pioneering new offerings, processes, and market opportunities).
Towards these trends, our clients have significantly invested in data-related technologies and talent over the past several years, including:
- Data governance to cater to enterprise-level financial reporting and regulatory compliance as an example.
- Self-service data discovery (e.g., products like TIBCO Spotfire®) have empowered the business community, giving them more freedom to do data analysis.
- AI is coming to the fore, with a new class of citizen data scientists and tools expanding the talent pool.
- Further predictive analytics, enterprise-wide catalogs and search, and 360-degree views of customer and product are also new capabilities our clients are keen to adapt at scale.
From a data integration point of view, a rich mix of batch processing (ETL), near real-time data provisioning (data virtualization), and event-based processing capabilities are required to support this wide range of data needs.”
Where TIBCO Data Virtualization Advancements Help
Vanniarajan then went on to explain, “Data virtualization is critical in assisting our clients to fulfill many of their operational and innovation needs. Data virtualization works like a ‘Swiss Army knife for data.’ It enables client data engineers to access and federate data across on-premise, cloud, and external sources. It transforms data for easier business user or application consumption. Lower cost, faster time to solution, reuse of shared data assets, and consistent governance are but a few of its value propositions.
Adding streaming data to its current data-at-rest paradigm, TIBCO Data Virtualization 8.3 is a very cool advancement for our clients. It would help, for example, a model of casing annulus pressure build-up while drilling to predict outcomes more reliably if it combined real-time sensor data streams with related context data. This kind of in-motion and at-rest integration will be a lot easier with the new release.
What Genware Thinks Is Cool
I wrote about Sherlock Holmes and his TIBCO Data Virtualization practice in an earlier blog. Like Vanniarajan, Sherlock felt that the new streaming capability would bring a lot of value to his clients.
Here is what Sherlock had to say:
“Our clients are demanding access to real-time and near real-time to make informed decisions while they are relevant. The new streaming data virtualization features allow us to provide immediate insights using real-time data along with comparing these insights to the past.
As an example, our manufacturing clients will use streaming data virtualization to combine real-time process data with related operational data to provide the real-time dashboards that quality and process engineers require to reduce production downtime while monitoring quality control variables. With this insight, our clients can better maximize return on factory investments, reduce scrap, and improve quality.”
What Do You Think is Cool? If you attended this what’s new and what’s next session, it would be great to get your feedback on what you thought was cool. Existing customers can access the release notes on the TIBCO Community. And if you would like to learn more about TIBCO Data Virtualization in general, head here for more info.
