It’s a popular perception (or at least one I hear frequently) that public cloud platforms are not well suited for enterprise-level, mission-critical systems. I do not believe this perception to be true. Allow me to explain why…
In the commercial banking world, predicting when customers might default on their loans is imminent – and as enterprise-class a computing problem an organization can have. It requires modeling and simulating hundreds – or even thousands – of different scenarios quickly.
When Bankinter, a leading Spanish commercial bank, became constrained by their existing capacity and could no longer vertically scale to meet demand, the bank turned to the cloud for adjustable computing capacity. Given the macro-economic challenges with the global loan and mortgage markets (and Spain’s regional market is not exempt from these pressures), this type of modeling and analysis is more important than ever.
Why would such a large organization (approx. $2B per year in revenues and 5,000 employees) do such a thing? It’s not really a question of why, but more of why not? They would have immediate access to scalable, on-demand technology resources – without the costly hardware upgrades. They could increase their flexibility to address new business requirements in real time. And they could ensure the secure management and analysis of highly sensitive data.
By integrating TIBCO GridServer® software hosted on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute™ (a.k.a. Amazon EC2™), the bank not only moved their workloads to the cloud and realized these benefits – they have also been able to tap this unlimited resource pool to run their portfolio analysis 100 times faster and at a lower cost.
Like most successes, it’s hard to achieve them alone. So if you’re thinking about moving your services to the cloud – be sure to also ask for guidance. TIBCO not only automated the integration and connectivity of Bankinter to the cloud, we also provided an extra layer of security and control to how Bankinter and Amazon communicate – so there’s an additional level of comfort when moving critical data off-premise.
In closing, before you start down Discounting Cloud Capability Lane, consider your options but don’t let popular perceptions lead the way. Sometimes you need to ask the critical “why not?”

Here at TIBCO, you will often find folks talking about event-driven computing as the key to achieving the two-second advantage™ (what we define as the ability to capture the right information at the right time and act on it preemptively for a competitive advantage).

It is also the key to achieving a business-optimized cloud. Everything that happens in your cloud (and this holds true for both public and cloud models) is an event. By monitoring and tracking for specific events and the patterns they create, your cloud can respond accordingly – optimizing your operations.

Unlocking this power requires processes and applications to know what to do when events occur. With TIBCO Silver™, for example, you can easily build business rules around how your private or public cloud responds to specific scenarios.

Best of all: you can deploy just the right amount of software where you need it, when you need it. Here are some examples of cloud events and the automated real time action:

- A cloud-based process has a long queue of requests backed up in the system > The process dynamically adds more resources to handle the volume.

- An important customer is trying to execute a large transaction > Private cloud software allocates resources based on priority – allowing the transaction to go through uninterrupted

- A data center starts to reach capacity >A private cloud flexes to provide the public cloud with needed capacity

With TIBCO’s public cloud services, such as Silver CAP and Silver BPM, you can leverage a TIBCO infrastructure that has event processing at its core to create and deploy cloud applications and processes in a matter of minutes. Elastic by nature, these cloud services dynamically grow or shrink based on service deployment demand.

For those Silver customers running a private cloud in their own data center, the Silver Fabric management software analyzes events published by the private cloud software, running enterprise applications and the infrastructure to optimize the infrastructure for both performance and utilization.

Interested in learning more?
• What is TIBCO Silver?
• What is the two-second advantage? Hear TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé break it down.

With the acquisition of Loyalty Lab, TIBCO has added a leading SAAS vendor to the Silver portfolio of cloud applications. Loyalty Lab specializes in cross-sell and up-sell solutions, delivered as software-as-a-service technology to accelerate and motivate positive changes in customer value and customer loyalty. Loyalty Lab customers use the platform to grow the value of their customer base through programs, campaigns, and offers with an active component – loyalty, incentives, discounts, or other rewards.

The Loyalty Lab founders commented:

Loyalty is no longer a nice to have—in today’s mobile and social media-centric world, you gotta have it. When we started the business, sometimes we had to spend hours with prospects explaining what loyalty was and how brands might be advantaged by having automated systems programmatically up and cross-selling their new, better, next-best and evangelistic customers regularly. We intuitively knew but now emphatically know that it’s just 15% of a brand’s customers that almost always represent 85% of their profits.

The entire nature of the public vs. private cloud debate is shifting; customers no longer view cloud computing as a question of on-premise private cloud vs. Internet based public cloud. Instead a much more business savvy perspective is emerging;

What investments do I have to make in cloud for the highest level of control and security over my applications AND still drive down costs?

The mainstream definitions are pretty simple:

Public clouds are defined by services such Amazon Web Services which provide on-demand infrastructure over the internet or software-as-a-service providers like Salesforce.com and NetSuite providing business applications under a subscription model

Private cloud is defined as bringing the power and flexibility of the cloud in-house as a management framework for how an enterprise runs its datacenter. Software used to build a private cloud has to recreate the self-service, automation and elasticity inherent in public cloud environments

We recently wrote about how private clouds are often based on virtualization software but also require some workload management, application management and self-service operations management capability.

Private Cloud Stack

Another dimension of infrastructure management for private clouds is that they must also support the hybrid model and integrate the enterprise with the public cloud world. Software to run your private cloud should enable enterprise customers to build a secure cloud environment, one that encompasses physical machines, or resources sources from the public cloud IAAS services (Amazon, Rackspace, etc..).

Also the private cloud software should provide higher value services that make integrating public cloud resources easier. These higher value services should include the capability to develop business rules that define sharing of infrastructure, mechanisms for integrating security based on corporate standards and designing workflows and to make sure that users have the flexibility and control required.

All of these capabilities together will create the framework for enterprise organizations to adopt public cloud infrastructure. Together private cloud software integrated with public cloud infrastructure will enable the highest level of control and security over enterprise applications and still drive down costs.

TIBCO’s CTO Matt Quinn appeared on “This week in Cloud Computing“, with David Linthicum and offered his views on the state of the cloud computing market and what TIBCO is doing with Silver.

When I go and talk to customers and partners about cloud computing and more specifically private clouds, executives always want to know where private clouds fit in their IT landscape. Here at TIBCO we believe that private clouds are a delivery model for enterprise IT, where scalable and elastic infrastructure, platforms and applications are delivered as services to internal customers.

That definition seems simple enough, but the same questions always arise, isn’t that the same thing as virtualization, or is private cloud just a fancy word for virtualization? These questions are not a surprise, most enterprise IT organizations we work with have spent the past few years working with virtualization software and they want to understand how a private cloud intersects or enhances that investment.

In working with many enterprise customers we have found that there are three core capabilities that management software you run your private cloud on should provide:

1. Infrastructure Management: the ability to define a shared pool (or pools) of infrastructure from physical resources, virtual resources or infrastructure resources you source from a public cloud provider

Noted industry analyst (and friend) James Staten from Forrester said it perfectly in a recent web cast (excerpts posted on PrivateCloud.com) - It’s not as easy as setting up a VMware environment and thinking you’re done… Virtualization is a good step on the way, but isn’t the whole enchilada.

2. Application Management: the ability to encapsulate and migrate existing enterprise applications and platforms so that your applications become more elastic. The private cloud management software must enable your existing software applications to scale (and shrink) based on demand and usage

Matt Prigge from InfoWorld captured this perfectly in an interesting blog post called – Finding a Home for Private Cloud So here’s how the private cloud is different: It’s built to mimic the functionality of a public, multitenant cloud rather than simply automating a collection of privately managed server resources. This difference is subtle, yet very important.

3. Operations Management: if you want to deliver a service to the enterprise, then you need to give you’re users a simple way to access the service. If you want to see how this works, take a look at the self-service operations management demo

If you put all three of these capabilities together - infrastructure, applications and operations management – then you have the capability to deliver scalable and elastic infrastructure, platforms and applications as services to your internal customers.

And that is a heck of a lot more valuable to your organization than just virtualization.

For more information on how to run your private cloud on TIBCO Silver - check out the “run” page of the Silver site.

Silver team has been traveling the world as part of the TIBCO NOW 40-city road show. On a recent stop in London noted industry analyst Simon Holloway of Bloor Research wrote a very interesting review of TIBCO’s Enterprise 3.0 strategy.

“This was the first time that I have started to understand how the TIBCO portfolio fits together. Yes there are some still some holes, but that is more due to time-constraints of trying to cram into a set time, information on the complete portfolio. Bloor applaud TIBCO for developing a strategy that both pulls together all their product portfolio into a seamless whole whilst at the same time being able to offer the ability to switch parts of the portfolio out because of the big use of open standards. Well done TIBCO. More please.”

Here at TIBCO, we view service orientation as a good approach to software development that enables software business logic to be accessed via a well-defined interface.

Service orientation is also a very important concept when it comes to understanding cloud computing.

Every vendor and analyst firm has a definition of cloud computing. Every one of them talk about Internet technologies and on-demand capabilities, but few focus on the key transformative value of the cloud for enterprise IT shops – the change in the way enterprise IT organizations will deliver and consume software and IT infrastructure.

The National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) for the US Government has a vendor agnostic definition of cloud computing that highlights the cloud as a service delivery model … .

The reason that I like the NIST definition is because it starts with the words “cloud computing is a model”. The NIST does not say “cloud computing is a product” or “cloud computing is a technology” – instead they define cloud as model for enterprise IT organizations to deliver and consume software and IT infrastructure.

Thinking of the cloud as a service delivery model has transformative potential for the enterprise and is central to the way that we think about TIBCO Silver™. TIBCO Silver™ CAP and TIBCO Silver BPM™ are cloud services that enable our customers to quickly and easily build new cloud native applications and business processes.

So what are the differences between cloud services like TIBCO Silver CAP and TIBCO Silver BPM and traditional enterprise software products?

• Cloud services don’t require any on premise infrastructure
• Cloud services will have a usage cost model – either subscription or on-demand
• Cloud services will leverage the cloud infrastructure (IAAS layer) for elasticity and scalability

But most importantly, TIBCO Silver cloud services make building a new application or business process dramatically easier.

TIBCO Silver cloud services abstract the heavy lifting of infrastructure behind a well defined interface, because cloud computing is not a product or technology it’s a service delivery model.

TIBCO first announced TIBCO Silver™ more than twelve months ago and this is the first major refresh of the site. Today TIBCO Silver is radically different than when we first launched the brand.

Today, TIBCO Silver is a portfolio of cloud services for building new applications and business process flows on the cloud, running your private cloud, or just simply getting work done by using a TIBCO Silver cloud application.

Where twelve months ago TIBCO Silver was only a platform for building new cloud applications and business process flows, we have added new capabilities, which accelerate the use of cloud computing in the enterprise.

Run Your Private Cloud on TIBCO Silver

First off TIBCO acquired DataSynapse – an innovative startup and leader in the grid computing and private cloud markets. Now our enterprise IT customers can run their private clouds with TIBCO Silver.

TIBCO Silver™ Fabric (product formerly known as DataSynapse FabricServer) provides operations management, application management, and run time management for organizations looking to bring the power of cloud computing in house.

Use TIBCO Silver Cloud Applications Now

To illustrate the power of the TIBCO Silver platform for writing and hosting new and differentiated business services, TIBCO has created a series of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, which business users can start using right now.

One of the most innovative and exciting cloud applications is TIBCO Silver™ Spotfire®. TIBCO Silver Spotfire lets anyone build interactive dashboards and visualizations of key business information and share those dashboards online.

By registering for the free one-year trial, you can download the award-winning TIBCO Spotfire® software, start building analytics and remarkably interactive dashboards and publish them to the cloud in minutes without time-consuming setup or infrastructure.

It’s an exciting new beginning for silver.tibco.com and we look forward to hearing from you and taking part in the discussion.