Enterprise social networking platforms –especially cloud-based ones—are quickly growing, although it isn’t clear whether staff are completely embracing them.
That isn’t stopping providers from rolling out new features.
The latest is Tibco Software Inc., which on Wednesday announced three new capabilities for its Tibbr platform at the company’s annual Tucon conference in Las Vegas.
In an interview Ram Menon, president of Tibco Software’s social media division said the additions are:
–Tibbr Files, for discovering and sharing documents. Included as part of the platform, it deals with the fact that organizations likely have structured and unstructured data in many places — locally in repositories like SharePoint, or in the cloud in places like DropBox.
One problem is that while IT might like divisions to standardize, they’re likely to have many storage solutions.
Files brings all data storage sources into Tibbr. Once a user has logged into the platform, there’s no need to log into other storage sites.
Files includes connectivity to Box, Huddle, DropBox, SharePoint and Google Drive. Other sources can be liked to. A dashboard shows all files that are shared with a user;
–Tibbr Task, for centralizing the creation task lists and managing projects. It’s an option that is priced separately and will be released before the end of the November.
The utility lets users create tasks directly from a post, a file, a meeting or an application, track and update tasks with social notifications, and see all task through a dashboard.
Most of the people you work with on projects will be on Tibbr, the company argues, so task management should leverage that.
–Tibbr Pages, for real-time publishing by aggregating data streams. Also an extra-price add-on.
Many departments create or collect content – think of marking, legal and HR, for example. But the way they publish can vary: some send content to a Web team, others turn to email.
Pages allows subscribers search internally or on the Web for data, to drag and drop onto a page and publish. Content like links to social media are automatically updated.
Tibbr competes with platforms like Salesforce Chatter, VMware’s Socialcast, Microsoft Yammer and others. According to a recent IDC survey 78 per cent of 700 North American organizations have deployed an enterprise social network. Twenty-eight per cent have more than one.
(For a deeper look into enterprise social platforms, see the feature in this issue of Computing Canada)
Manon said Tibbr now has 6.5 million paid subscribers, up from 1.5 million 12 months ago.
“We came a little later to the market,” Menon acknowleged, “but we focused heavily on what an enterprise user wants. We are secure, you can buy Tibbr on premise, or in the cloud, we deliver scale –we have companies that have over 100,000 users.”
Publicly-traded Tibco [Nasdaq: TIBX] is known for its Spotfire analytics software Enterprise Messaging platform, ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks development platform and Enterprise Service Bus.
It isn’t known for flashy products – this year it introduced Tibco Cloud Bus, Tibco Iris (for analyzing machine generated data like logs), and bought Streambase Systems (which makes event processing and real-time analytics software).
It has just come off a successful third quarter, announcing net income of US$46.3 million on revenue of just over US$270 million.
In their keynotes, company officials said Tibco is going to focus on big data, cloud computing and integration.
