Predictive technologies help companies and systems cope with swings in business, says Tibco CEO
I try to visit my founding sponsors on a regular basis to catch up with what's going on, and to chat about the industry. So recently I went down to Palo Alto for a meeting with Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive and his right hand man Ram Menon, senior vice president, Worldwide Marketing. Tibco has been a stalwart supporter of SiliconValleyWatcher from the beginning.
I like this company - and there's nothing in our contract that forces me to say that. I like the culture, and I like the people. Tibco is very much old school Silicon Valley, calm, collegiate, an engineering culture.
This time, we're talking about Vivek's book project on the "Predictive Enterprise" a concept that describes Tibco's approach, and technologies that allow large companies to foresee business swings and take appropriate action.
Predictive technologies can flag forthcoming drops in inventories for example, so companies can scale back manufacturing. The cherry on the cake is that the predictive technologies are linked tightly to a company's supporting IT infrastructure. This means more efficient IT management because loads on IT resources become predictable. This enables telcos, for example, to meet service level agreements they have with large customers.
Vivek and I also chat about the valley and the executive changes going on. I ask him where he thinks the next generation of Silicon Valley business leaders will come from. He says Silicon Valley still has the same group of roughly 200 movers and shakers it has had for many years. And he doesn't know where the next generation of business leaders will come from. I can't point to more than a handful myself. In the long term, that could be a problem.
