TIBCO channel chief explains new industry-specific strategy

Recently, TIBCO’s SVP of worldwide partner ecosystem and OEM sales Tony Beller was named on CRN.com’s Channel Chief list for 2021. In an interview, Beller discussed what the coming year will look like for TIBCO and its channel partners.

The big takeaway from the conversation was that TIBCO is making changes to its product strategy that will bring it in line with the current trend toward industry-specific solutions.

“With our new CEO and customer experience manager, we have decided to align products and solutions more with the industries we serve in order to better meet our customers’ needs,” Beller said. 

He explains that the biggest verticals for TIBCO at the moment are finance, manufacturing, government, and energy and utilities. He highlights government in particular as a growing market for data management and analytics in Australia.

“Our partners have already been creating industry-specific solutions organically, such as Citizen 360 in Australia [an Ascention Services product] that helps Australian regional governments manage citizen data. Our partner ecosystem is aligned really well for this approach.”

Beller outlined how the pursuit of faster and better insights are now driving the data industry as scale and analytics are now simply expected by most organisations.

“It’s about getting that data as fast as possible and then using that data to make accurate predictions. For example, customers with massive solar panel arrays need realtime data to know how the energy is being utilised or how much is going into the grid. We have another use case, not in Australia, where we are helping a police force to predict where and when crime might occur.”

He laughed at a response suggesting a similarity to sci-fi blockbuster Minority Report: “yeah, something like that.”

In the announcement of Beller’s naming as a CRN Channel Chief, he described TIBCO’s ‘unparalleled’ emphasis on partners. He expanded on this, explaining what that actually looks like in practice.

“It’s about the drive toward three-way conversations where partners are brought into the conversations we have with customers. This can be complicated – and it’s a lot of fun – but ensuring that partners are part of the conversation is vital to ensuring that end customers are getting what they expect.”

Beller also explained how TIBCO is incentivising partners to approach customers in a way that prioritises business outcomes.

“We’ve created the customer excellence framework and a big aspect of that is enabling our partner ecosystem. The first part of this is what we call C.O.Ps, customer outcome pods, where we go through the customer’s needs in a three-way conversation with us, them and the partner.

“Second, we incentivise partners not just to provide software, but to deliver business outcomes. We take into account their industry experience and certification. We also get feedback from customers.”

He explained that this feedback is collected through surveys sent out to customers that ask how well they achieved the outcomes they were looking for and about their experience with the partner.

As for TIBCO’s ongoing presence in the local channel, Beller says that the company has seen a lot of uptake from bigger partners.

“Globally, we have a robust partner ecosystem and that is growing in ANZ. We’re seeing an uptick in engagements from the big systems integrators who are focused on outcomes and driving transformation. 

“With the acquisition of Information Builders, we have a lot of partners who are interested in bringing those capabilities to the Australian market and, with the growing need for gaining value from data in every industry, we are expecting increased business across Australia.”