Tibco buys DataSynapse
Sep 15th, 2009 by admin
It wasn’t unexpected that someone would throw DataSynapse a lifeline, it had been on the ropes for a while. I am just annoyed that I missed it as was on holiday when it happened. I apologise then if my comment seems rather late.
On the 24th August, they day I left for a nice long vacation, it was announced that the foremost Grid provider to the financial services industry, had been bought by TIBCO. The fact that it was TIBCO was to some extent unexpected, and those of us in the know expected bids to come from the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and perhaps even Platform. The £28m dollars that TIBCO paid (almost half of which was to clear DataSynapse obligations) was 1/3rd the value of offers made only 18 months ago, a sorry state indeed. At one point it did seem that DataSynapse would struggle to survive, but its impressive customer list and guaranteed revenue through long term licensing models made them an attractive proposition for the right buyer at the right price.
I have been wondering thought why TIBCO bought them. Granted they will get their money back in 3 years on GridServer Licenses, and of course TIBCO don’t have a grid solution. So they have an opportunity to open a new market. It may in fact work well in both TIBCO and DataSynapse favour as TIBCO has access to a large market outside of finance, much of which has a need for highly resilient parallel compute (Telecos, Pharma, Engineering etc) and GridServer is a proven parallel compute platform with provenance at massive scale in high pressure and high profile applications. However GridServer is old technology now and competitors have overtaken it in both scale and performance. To keep its market share TIBCO will need to invest in GridServer development, and to some extent re-engineering.
I don’t think that TIBCO bought DataSynapse for GridServer though. I think they were much more interested in the Private Cloud business and wanted to integrate DataSynapse Fabric Server - a demand and policy based application scalability product with Silver an enterprise wide cloud platform. Fabric server has not been particularly successful, partially because in early incarnations it didn’t support vm’s and virtualisation was at the application container level (armies of consultants were required for even the simplest on-boarding) and partly because the private cloud sale was much much harder (it still is very hard) when fabric server came to market two or more years ago. TIBCO silver, “Amazon for dummies” seems to be designed to address the private, enterprise level service oriented infrastructure market which will allow enterprises to scale applications on demand. Bringing these two technologies together seems like a good idea, particularly as Fabric server has already got containers for Oracle 11g and WebLogic (which makes me wonder why Oracle weren’t in the market at such a cheap price) and a couple of high profile customers.
So in my crystal ball I see:
- a confluence of Silver and Fabric server, with Silver absorbing fabric server
- A strong push from TIBCO to create and dominate the private cloud market
- a possible re-engineering of Grid Server to make use of TIBCO technologies which will make it competitive in its existing market
- The expansion of GridServer outside of the finance market using TIBCO’s contacts and reputation
Buy buying DataSynapse TIBCO have acquired a strong development team which with strong direction can produce market leading products. For the moment DataSynapse will exist as a separate entity, for how long this remains practical remains to be seen. Existing customers will continue to get support for existing products and will be waiting with anticiapation to see if there are changes to the licensing model. Many of them are the same one who had a nasty shock just after Oracle acquired coherence.
