Chief Marketing Officer Raj Verma.

I recently returned from Las Vegas and Tibco Software's user conference, TUCON12. It was a good place to catch up with Tibco, one of my most loyal and longtime sponsors.

This year the theme was: "Everything is different. How do you prepare for the future when everything keeps changing?"

The need for an agile IT infrastructure that can respond in real time and also anticipate what's coming next is more important than ever.

Tibco's technologies live in the very heart of large corporations' IT systems, they tie many different systems together, and they also unite employees and partners into social enterprises that unlock the tremendous stores of knowledge and experience already within organizations.

Tibbr

Tibco's Tibbr social network app has more users than Yammer, which was bought recently by Microsoft for $1.2 billion. Yet often, Tibco doesn't receive the recognition from the stock market for the value of its business groups.

Ram Menon, president of Social Computing at Tibco (above) says that Tibbr is a strategic asset that has become a vital component in its stack of enterprise IT technologies and there are plans to expand its usefulness. In November a new version of the Tibbr suite will be opened up to external developers. He says that people are the real API of an organization and Tibbr is the best expression of a company's top asset.

Mr Menon said that Tibbr is finding new users all the time, including by police authorities. Jay Grant, Secretary General of InterPort Police, (above, speaking with Ram Menon), said that Tibbr allows police to quickly span the globe with information that can be used in real time to stop terrorists and smugglers.

David Kirkpatrick, (above) formerly a senior editor at Fortune, and now heading the Techonomy conference, moderated several panels at TUCON12.

The panel on Big Data featured: Justin Eggart, General Manager GE Energy; N.X. Morini Bianzino, Senior Manager at Accenture; Sandeep Dadlani, Head of America at Infosys; Fabrice Pizzi, Chief Information Security Officer at Eiffage; Michael Swartz, Strategy and Business Development at Perkin Elmer. A key takeaway was that "Big Data" is less important than the right data at the right time. Context of data has been a key theme at Tibco for many years.

James Murren, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MGM Resorts International.

John Shewell, Director, Product Management at McKesson Provider Technologies delivered some very scary statistics about the cost of healthcare in the US and the need for technologies that can anticipate where care is needed. He said that about 5% of patients consume about 50% of healthcare costs.

Tibco announced support for Tibbr from Dropbox, COO Dan Levin above.

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, now chairman of Wayin also spoke at the conference (video below).

More info:

Vivek Ranadivé - Real Time With Vivek - Forbes

TIBCO: The Dark Horse of Enterprise Social Software? - Forbes

Tibco's Tucon is an Event About Events

Big Data is watching a million fireflies | Successful Workplace

TUCON® | Streaming - Day One

TUCON® | Streaming - Day Two

The TIBCO Blog