tibbr – Tibco’s BPM Social Enterprise Platform

Nothing gets me more excited than seeing innovation in our sleepy industry.

On Monday Tibco launched tibbr, their new BPM Social Enterprise Platform.
It’s the commercial enterprise twin of Twitter and Facebook, and has a similar approach that allows employees to “follow” each other and subscribe to specific subjects within the organisation.

Yes, there has been some criticism, cautions of hype and some scepticism, but I personally believe it’s the right way forward.

Don’t kid yourself, just because you’re not using Twitter doesn’t mean that technology will wait for you. Once a new technology starts rolling, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
I’ve written a few posts before on the subject of Enterprise Twitters. I see these Enterprise Activity Streams as the next big thing in BPM. It will not only change the way we build business processes – it will completely change the way we work.

Looking over the shoulder of my colleagues, I can see two applications popping up all the time – Outlook and Skype.
Outlook for the big chunks of information, Skype for sending code scripts, urls, and quick responses and decisions. The biggest problem we have with the latter is that these decisions are not saved anywhere.
Solutions like tibbr have a database that should enable you to create reports, build audit trails etc.. I’ll still be stuck with this information island called “Outlook” (bless Microsoft…) that doesn’t enable me to do the same, but we’re getting there… slowly.

BPM Enterprise Activity Streams
There are now two enterprise BPM Enterprise Activity Streams solutions in the industry (one more and Gartner can create a Quadrant for it…)
So… How does tibbr compare with IBM Blueworks Live ?

It’s hard to say. Tibco’s marketing team were so happy patting each other on the back, they completely forgot to supply information on the new product.
Their live feed of the launch crashed and their twitter feed was full of retweets of each other’s sales pitch.
I would of loved to show you a screen shot of their new product, or provide you with more information but… (hint, hint)

Tibco offer tibbr at $12 per user per month.
IBM offer Blueworks Live at $10 per user per month (contributor) and $50 (editor).
Both affordable solutions.

So what features does tibbr offer?
tibbr connects with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, interacts with the other business IT applications in the organisation.
Integrates with the organization’s LDAP, to find colleagues through profiles that display names, pictures, departments and descriptions.
You can follow “subjects”, not just people.
You can choose to receive posts as emails or SMS notifications and reply directly, with responses showing up instantly in the proper stream.
Works with Phone, Droid, Blackberry and iPad