Yesterday Nimbus announced it’s acquisition by TIBCO in which is described the move as deepening their “abilities in process discovery and governance, social collaboration, and analytics,”
Apart from the obvious size difference in terms of market share and value, this was clearly a move in terms of capabilities that both were lacking, especially TIBCO. And this is where it gets interesting. If you think on it, it’s actually an admission of failure (and of lessons learnt) because both are squarely pitched in the separate worlds of Business and IT. Nimbus is a business users tool, and the better for it, but it couldn’t penetrate the IT veil and whet their appetite for destruction with a BPM tool. TIBCO is too technical to appeal to the shop floor analyst and business user and so they remain with Visio.
It’s also interesting because TIBCO had a ‘social’ element to it’s suite with TIBBR, does this mean they think got the social collaboration functionality wrong ?
So what does this ultimately mean ?
It means BPM needs to be for both worlds, Business and IT, at the same time. Perhaps the greatest social and collaboration lesson here is to make these two divisions one again.
Something we knew all along. Something the vendors tried to sell us as different…..
