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Tibco’s Orchestra acquisition will mean ‘faster IT integration’
Tibco’s strategic acquisition of Paris-based Orchestra networks will ‘benefit customers of both companies’
Tibco’s acquisition of Orchestra Networks will provide large businesses with a one-stop shop for integrating multiple IT systems and performing sophisticated data analytics, the companies have said.
Palo Alto-based Tibco announced its acquisition of Paris-based Orchestra Networks on 4 December. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Orchestra Networks, a private company founded in Paris in 2000, supplies around 200 large companies, including banks, financial services companies and manufacturers, with its EBX master data management software that allows them to manage and aggregate data held in different computer systems.
The company, which has revenues of over €20m, will operate as a standalone unit within Tibco. Christophe Barriolade, co-founder and CEO of Orchestra, will run the EBX business, reporting to chief operating officer (COO) Matt Quinn.
Mark Palmer, senior vice-president and general manager of analytics at Tibco, said Orchestra Networks’ EBX software was a strategically important addition to Tibco’s data analytics and integration technology.
“You can’t do good analytics unless you have trusted, organised, checked and governed data,” he said. “EBX is a tool that turns a data swamp into data assets. So it is extremely strategic.”
A good fit
Barriolade said it had been working closely with Tibco for the past five years and had a significant number of customers in common. He described the two companies as a good strategic fit.
“From a strategic standpoint it made total sense, it’s very complementary. That is what really drove the discussion towards an acquisition,” he said.
Orchestra will continue to supply Tibco EBX software to companies that use analytics technology from a range of suppliers, including IBM or Tableau, a data visualisation specialist.
EBX will remain a standalone product, capable of integrating with any software, but over time, Tibco and Orchestra will integrate EBX more closely with Tibco’s data analytics software, Spotfire.
“That is the overall idea: stay a pure-play technology, but integrate better and better with the Tibco platform,” said Barriolade.
Palmer said Orchestra Networks’ EBX software was a good fit with Tibco’s data virtualisation technology, which it acquired when it bought Composite Software in October 2017.
Data virtualisation makes it possible for organisations to create a virtual pool of data drawn from a wide range of different data sources and to interrogate it, without disrupting the original records or placing an extra load on the original database hardware.
The deal will allow Tibco to act as single supplier for large businesses that will help them to integrate their IT systems and their data, and link that to supply analytics. This will mean faster, easier IT projects, said Palmer.
Orchestra’s customers will be able to use Tibco’s visualisation and predictive analytics software to analyse their data, and to make data driven-business decisions, said Barriolade.
International banks are using the EBX technology to manage the data they need for regulatory compliance, under BCDS 239 – a set of guidelines issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.
“The regulation states that everything starts with the ability to capture all the data that are used to build this risk aggregation. So again, with EBX, they can manage all the physical data elements, the technical metadata and the reference data that support a BCDS 239 compliance programme,” said Barriolade.
Other sectors using the technology include manufacturers and retailers. A fast food chain is using the company’s master data management software to manage data on menu items, the locations of its restaurants, and franchises, providing a single set of data to restaurants across the company.
Internet of things
Tibco predicts that the rapid expansion of the internet of things (IoT) will drive demand for EBX, which will find applications in managing data generated by connected devices.
“Imagine you are an oil and gas company and you have thousands of oil wells and each oil well has hundreds of devices and one of those has thousands of devices. Being able to manage that is a hard problem,” said Palmer.
Barriolade said Orchestra Networks competes with a broad range of companies, but that its most direct competitor is Informatica.
He said Informatica relied on a number of master data management products, whereas Orchestra had a single data management product that “operated out of the box”.
Read more about Tibco
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