by Boris Evelson.

Remember George Costanza from a Seinfeld episode where he was pulling his hair out about “the two worlds colliding”? He was agonizing over the world of his girlfriends and the world of his friends that should never mix. In my world, process and data, separate disciplines until recently, are now “colliding”. While some of the vendors have already been toying with the convergence of both disciplines (IBM, Oracle, SAP), today’s announcement by Tibco that it will acquire a Spotfire, is the first transaction that will merge a pureplay middleware vendor with a pureplay BI vendor (a convergence that Forrester’s been predicting for almost a year, please see our Business Intelligence Meets BPM In The Information Workplace research document. But by acquiring Spotfire, Tibco has actually achieved more than one goal.

1. Being efficient is no longer enough. Enterprises can no longer stay competitive just by squeezing more efficiencies from operational applications, including workflow, business process management (BPM) and business rules engine (BRE) — business intelligence applications are needed to become more effective. For example, while workflow and rules are be used to efficiently process a customer credit application, Business Intelligence analytics are needed to effectively segment customer population and extend the credit offer to a much more targeted customer segment for a better response, cross-sell/up-sell ratios.
2. The actual convergence of process and data. The other slant is the natural interdependency of process and data from two angles: a) one needs data to feed and enrich the business process and process rules, and b) an event (an alert, for example) triggered by a data condition has to go into a process so that it can be followed up and acted on.

3. Explosive data growth. Digital data (structured and unstructured) volumes are growing at 30% a year, and will be reaching zetabyte sizes by year 2010 — that’s a number with 21 zeros! Traditional analytical methods fail when data volumes reach hundreds of terabytes or number of dimensions exceed several hundreds — and this is where BI vendors based on advanced data visualization (like Spotfire) play best.

4. While this was a relatively small transaction, I am predicting/hoping that there will be a more impactful move next, potentially coming from BEA acquiring a larger BI vendor.