Review of Tibbr social enterprise platform – keynote at Sydney launch on February 8

The launch last week in San Francisco of Tibbr, the social enterprise computing platform from TIBCO, attracted an immense amount of attention from the leading commentators in the space. The offering is not directly comparable to any existing enterprise social software suites, and draws on TIBCO’s strong integration heritage to create an offering that works fully across an organization’s activities.

Tibbr global launch events follow in London (yesterday) and in Sydney on February 8 at the Opera House, where I will give the opening keynote on Why social computing will drive organisational success. Here are registration details for the Sydney launch of Tibbr next week.

I hope to offer some personal thoughts on the Tibbr platform after the launch event. For now I thought it would be most appropriate simply to review some of the more interesting comments on Tibbr since the launch.

To start, here is an interview by Dennis Howlett of TIBCO’s CEO, Vivek Ranadive. Vivek begins by saying that Tibbr is an extension of the vision he had since he started TIBCO (in 1985).

Dennis is a famous curmudgeon and cynic, a while ago summarizing his views as Enterprise 2.0: What a crock, so it’s a real turn-around for him to now write TIBCO launches tibbr: enough to make Enterprise 2.0 viable? He writes:

Will large companies ‘get it?’ I think they will, or rather their employees will. Users do not need IT support in order to get going with tibbr. From what I saw, the Facebook style interface should be familiar and easy to understand although like Facebook I wonder if it will become a tad messy. The fact I can switch between people and event views simply by clicking a tab means I can manage my event stream in the way that works best for me at the time I need to get something done.

After the launch event Dennis wrote a more nuanced post titled Understanding the TIBCO tibbr difference for Enterprise 2.0:

tibbr is device, application and system agnostic. It is not tied to any particular application. TIBCO’s heritage comes from taking those disparate applications and making them work together. TIBCO doesn’t care what apps you’re using as long as it can expose them into its messaging and integration platform. THAT’s the fundamental difference. Put another way, TIBCO is acting as the honest broker between competing solutions and saying: ‘We don’t care who you are as long as we can expose your data.’

ReadWriteWeb says TIBCO’s tibbr May Be the Enterprise 2.0 Solution You’ve Been Waiting For, writing:

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.
…
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.

Martin Lijnssen has written a detailed post Tibbr – the revolution starts right here which gives some great context. He says:

What is interesting, is the fact that “Tibco has crossed the line with tibbr”: from being an expert in connecting humans via linking machines to machines, it now directly links humans to machines. Social is all about linking people to people, and tibbr does that too and even better than some existing tools, but the real power of tibbr is about supplying information as fast as possible, across time-zones and regions, by simply directly connecting machines to humans – thus lifting work from the shoulders of people in between

Below are some of the other more interesting posts and articles so far on Tibbr. Unquestionably it is a product that is changing how people are thinking about social software in the enterprise.

IDG: Tibco aims at Salesforce, Socialtext with Tibbr platform
Tom Foremski: Tibco Launches tibbr: Social Computing For The Enterprise
Jacob Morgan in CMSWire: Tibbr: A True Enterprise Collaboration Platform Providing Both Content and Context
Estaban Kolsky: The Hype of Collaboration? I Could do Without It for One Day…
GigaOm: Tibbr Wants to Make Business Data More Social

More from me on Tibbr later.