Tibco's New Tools Target Utilities, Financial Services

Customer demand for a hefty payback on software deployments has led application-integration vendors to focus on tools that can automate industry-specific business processes. Tibco Software Inc. is the latest vendor to follow that trend by developing products for utilities and financial services and entering into joint sales agreements for partners' products in oil and gas and discrete manufacturing industries.

Tibco Real-Time Customer Service for Utilities can connect Siebel Systems Inc.'s customer-relationship management software with utility-specific back-office applications from SAP. For example, Tibco can connect Siebel with SAP's customer-billing system or service-order management component. Tibco Real-Time Trade Management for Financial Services integrates brokers' trading or settlement systems, including SunGard and Reuters, with computer systems supporting the Axion 4 Gateway, a standard for cross-border trades that's part of the one-day-trade goal for financial companies, known as Global Straight Through Processing. The package includes business process management software for tracking and viewing trades.

For the oil and gas industry, Tibco has joined systems integrator ZettaWorks LLC in developing a software package for drawing field data from production wells and delivering the information to engineers through a portal created with Tibco PortalBuilder. In addition, customers can get benchmark feeds from Ziff Energy Group through the portal to compare well performance with the rest of the industry. For discrete manufacturing, Tibco provides the integration technology for Web-based collaborative design software developed by Sierra Atlantic Inc. The two new products are part of a joint sales and marketing agreement with the partners.

Tibco is finding that its customers want integration tools that offer a quick return on investment by automating specific business process. "Five years ago, the buyers were earlier adopters and willing to take a product offering that was general purpose," says Peter Tebbenhoff, director of industry solutions for Tibco. "Now, as we go into the mainstream market, they want solutions that speak their language." The financial-services package is available now, while the other products will ship March 15. Prices start at $250,000.

Tibco competitor Vitria Technology Inc. is another example of an application-integration vendor releasing industry-specific software. Vitria last month started shipping system-to-system integration packages for health-care and financial companies looking to automate business processes associated with industry initiatives such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Global Straight Through Processing.