TIBCO’s tibbr May Be the Enterprise 2.0 Solution You’ve Been Waiting For

TIBCO‘s enterprise 2.0 offering tibbr has been a long time in the making. We first covered it in Oct. 2009. It was finally released from beta today, and the reaction has been positive. It seems that TIBCO took its time and got the product right.
It may be a bit late in the game, but Tibco has serious enterprise credibility and a solid product.

This, along with the announcement that Microsoft’s OfficeTalk may be commercially released, reminds us that there is still room at the enterprise 2.0 table for products from established enterprise vendors.

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So what’s the big deal about tibbr? Here’s a quick look at the features:

• Active Directory and LDAP integration
• Both cloud-based and on-premise offerings
• Enterprise software integration (Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, etc.)
• Social media integregation (Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn, etc.)
• RSS aggregation
• Mobile client for Android, BlackBerry and iOS (including the iPad)

It can aggregate social media, business intelligence, ERP and more into a single interface. It works with major enterprise software out of the box. In short, this is an enterprise-ready product from a serious vendor that’s ready a universal inbox.

Even enterprise 2.0 curmudgeon Dennis Howlett is impressed:

I first saw an early iteration of tibbr last year when it was used as a socially mediated communications tool at the company’s annual user conference. At the time I thought: ‘meh.’ It was like another Yammer with little to commend it beyond the ability to discover other attendees, share questions and the like.

Fast forward to last week when I was given a sneak preview of the latest iteration. Today, tibbr is a whole new animal with the ability to do what I have been asking of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. It intelligently marries people, process and context, delivering information the way people want to consume.

Howlett says that unlike other enterprise 2.0 solutions, tibbr doesn’t look like a solution looking for a problem.

Other companies, such as SimplyBox, SnapLogic, Socialcast and Socialtext have been trying to solve the integration problem for big enterprises. Interestingly, SimplyBox and Socialcast take a different approach – instead of a universal inbox, those products are trying to bring a social layer into existing products. This may be a better approach than adding a new application that aggregates information from other sources. Time will tell.

Where is TIBCO going with all this? It’s already touting the combination of its Spotfire business intelligence product with tibbr as “social BI.” And last month acquired loyalty management company Loyalty Lab, so watch for it to become more active in the social CRM space.

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