TIBCO launches tibbr, an enterprise "social desktop" solution for point solution hell

The battle for the enterprise "social desktop" just heated up with TIBCO's official launch of tibbr, which has been in beta for the past year or so. Tibbr is an enterprise-class social networking solution -- call it Enterprise 2.0 if you prefer buzzwords -- that will give Salesforce.com, SocialText, Yammer and numerous other contenders serious competition in the months ahead.

Of course, tibbr includes the "follow" paradigm of Facebook, Twitter and virtually every other social networking solution. What's significant here is the ability to follow virtually anything in the enterprise, creating a social layer to simplify information access.

Salesforce.com's Chatter offers a similar capability, although my take is that TIBCO has an edge due to its deep experience in enterprise integration. I think tibbr will appeal to CIOs that want a E2.0 solution that's independent of major application providers like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com.

Here's screenshot of tibbr's "workstream" to illustrate how a user could get a view of content from multiple systems.

Source: TIBCO

TIBCO's EVP Ram Menon says tibbr is part of their strategic shift out of the data center, where the company built its reputation on complex integration, to the consumer space. TIBCO has technology that can correlate historical data, transaction information and location-based data to enable an enterprise to serve up a precisely targeted real-time offer to a consumer. This kind of expertise that could swing deals in TIBCO's favor vs. other contenders, in my view.

Menon says enterprises are buying into this social/following idea, including MGM Resorts, large container line OOCL and consulting firm Ciber which, according to this report recently replaced Yammer with Tibbr.

Tibbr seems targeted to CIOs having nightmares about the idea of every department or every system having its own unique social network. And some of these CIOs are not necessarily on the cloud computing bandwagon, so TIBCO offers both hosted and installed versions.

This announcement is further evidence that large enterprises are moving towards becoming a Social Business, but don't want to live in point solution hell while doing so!

Further reading:
* TIBCO Software Redefines Social Computing for Business (press release)
* Yammer girds loins in battle for collaborative layer in Enterprise 2.0