TIBCO acquires Spotfire - Another One Bites the Dust

This just in from the land of M&A - TIBCO announced its intent to acquire Spotfire, a small BI vendor who positions themselves as next generation BI and analytics. However, this BI acquisition is different for a variety of reasons including who got bought, who did the buying and the fact that this really has less to do with BI and more to do with business process management and platforms. While many people have been writing about the intersection of BI, BPM, BAM and performance management, this time a player in BPM (as in business process) purchased a BI company. This represents one of the first acquisitions in the space and may well change the game for a variety of reasons.

TIBCO positions itself as a leader in BPM, but their focus and background is in integration centric process management. They tried to move up-stack and expand their footprint and relevance with the acquisition of Staffware a couple years ago, but they have had limited success in selling it. Gartner positions them as "process-aware middleware", but market reality is that they are an industrial strength ESB trying to come upstack to position themselves as a BPM player with focus on SOA - much the same aproach as BEA, just without the focus on application servers and aqua anything. They have clearly lacked optimization and analytics, something BPM vendors get very hot and bothered about. Enter Spotfire.

Spotfire positions themselves as the information insight company, and the leader in actionable analytics. They also position themselves as a leader and TIBCO promotes the same. Like most things, this is a function of what angle you look in the mirror. In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI Suites, published in January, Spotfire appeared for the first time, but smack in the bottom left quad. Gartner gives them credit as the only new entry in the category and calls out excellence in interactive analysis and in-memory analysis with capabilities for business analysts, not IT. This last piece is critically important to TIBCO and why this acquisition makes sense for all parties. Gartner also docks Spotfire for the things they don't have as a platform to compete in BI. Turns out maybe this is not about BI, especially not for TIBCO.

Among the things Gartner calls out is that Spotfire had limited channel strategy and reach. Joining the TIBCO family and getting access to their resources solves this problem in a big hurry. TIBCO's recognition that Spotfire gives them some sex appeal, solves their optimization gap and gives them something to talk about in analytics helps this make sense. It gives them something else to throw at market leaders like Savvion, Lombardi, and certainly BEA, who they most resemble. At a minimum this keeps things interesting.

A couple other observations:
1. There is not much precedent for infrastructure vendors to come up-stack and get relevant to business audiences in a business context like analytics and business intelligence. TIBCO's prior acquisition of Staffware for human centric process management has not proved to be successful to this audience, so this round either changes fortunes or looks like groundhog day.
2. The hype around optimization and analytics for process management by vendors and analysts just got a $200M validation. Does this signal something bigger?
3. The Gartner MQ for BI notes that the BI industry has now adopted a "process and strategy driven vision of BI." Interesting that the first real play in the space was not a BI company, but an integration focused BPM company putting their money where their website claims they are. Is the reality that BI is a nice add-on to BPM, not the other way around? Is the tail about to wag the dog?
4. The Gartner MQ notes an expectation of "co-mingling" between BI and BPM and calls out TIBCO and BEA by name. How long have these vendors been talking to Gartner about this? Who is next?

Interesting that today BEA announced a miss and the impact was speculation that BEA is next on the block to be acquired by Oracle or HP. Maybe we should be watching for BEA to make a play for a BI vendor. Look for things to get even more interesting.