TIBCO had their 4th quarter analyst call last week, and SeekingAlpha’s transcript has a few CEP mentions for TIBCO’s Q4 and 2011 FY:

• “Our business optimization category, which includes both BusinessEvents and Spotfire, grew over 50% in license revenue for the year and has doubled in the past 2 years.”
• “Business optimization was the clear growth driver this quarter, up 45% over last Q4. Both Spotfire and BusinessEvents, which make up this category, showed tremendous growth, and each had its largest quarter ever. BusinessEvents is also playing a larger and larger role in our platform sales, and therefore making up a larger and larger percentage of revenue on many deals.”
• “…everybody is moving into an eventing engine. And some people — we have clients that are actually replacing app servers with event servers. …”
• “It seems like the world is moving more and more to intelligent systems and driving intelligent outcomes in various verticals. “
• “…so everybody wants to completely go to the eventing platform if you’re a retailer. … Everybody wants to be able to go all the way down to the consumer. They want to be able to make you the offer before you leave the aisle, not 6 months after you leave the store. … so Macy’s was an early TIBCO adopter to go to this eventing platform. And I think their results have shown it. …”
• “One of the use cases we’re very excited about is for cybersecurity where people are now trying to look at events and anticipate that there might be trouble. And the — what we did in the government is now all of a sudden of interest everywhere. And in addition to our technology now being built into the smart grid, they’re using the cybersecurity component because once you have a smart grid, it can be hacked and that’s not so good. So we have some fantastic use cases around that. …”

Thanks to TIBCO exec Murat Somnez for pointing out this WSJ article on retailer (and TIBCO customer) JC Penney and their exploitation of IT to:

• integrate social media sites and targeted promotions
• provide a unified view of customers across “bricks and mortar” and e-commerce outlets
• use RFID in supply chain to improve stock level operational visibility

In particular: “Within the next 18 months, Penney shoppers will be able to receive location-specific promotions on their mobile devices when they walk into a store. They’ll also be able to get deals and see product reviews in stores by taking pictures of bar codes with their phones.”

Nice to see further exploitation of event processing in the mainstream, and it will be interesting to see how retailers improve the overall “shopping experience” by extending sensory inputs from just standard shop displays to include smartphone channels. Indeed, optimising the information passed on to shoppers across multiple channels and locations in stores (yet avoiding sensory overload!) is probably going to keep their retail psychologists busy too!

UK retailer Carphone Warehouse was in the news recently, announcing their transition to a TIBCO-based CRM system - in this case conventional workflows augmented by event- and rule-driven processes.

This use case has a good write-up (via MWD) available from TIBCO’s web site: some choice quotes are:

Background:
The Carphone Warehouse is a European telecommunications retailing and service provision group, based in the UK. The company is large, and has a record of fast growth: in its last financial year it reported revenues of over £3.9bn, but is still growing over 30% year­-on­-year. It currently employs around 20,000 staff in eleven markets. As its name implies, the company was founded as a mobile phone retailer. …

As is the case for so many large organisations, there came a point where the weight of “legacy” functionality became effectively unmaintainable in the face of continuing business change …  as a result, The Carphone Warehouse decided that as well as implementing a new billing system, it would also implement a new, distinct and separate CRM system. …

A service­-oriented approach to implementing the renewed billing capability and integrating it with the new CRM capability was identified and promoted early on … TIBCO products (Enterprise Messaging System and BusinessWorks) were selected for the SOA infrastructure … initially [the chosen CRM vendor's] inbuilt workflow functionality was selected as the platform for this. However as the project unfolded, the importance of long­-running processes, and asynchronous event-based flows … became increasingly apparent. It was at this point that the project team decided to extend The Carphone Warehouse’s investment in TIBCO technology to include the iProcess Suite (TIBCO’s BPM technology offering) and BusinessEvents (TIBCO’s Complex Event Processing offering).

Implementation:
The processes currently being implemented in the billing/CRM replacement implementation are focused on automating broadband service provisioning, and are prime examples of our “straight through processing” scenario …

The Carphone Warehouse is using TIBCO’s iProcess technologies to define and coordinate long­ running, stateful, system­-to-system integrations; it’s using TIBCO’s BusinessEvents technology to handle other stateful interactions, where there’s a need for near-­real-­time processing. …

Results:
…There’s already been one major success from this approach. In its retail business, the team has used the iProcess technology to deliver a reusable telecoms service activation process which has enabled the company to progress business expansion across Europe much more broadly and quickly than anticipated. The implementation cost just 20% of  the original estimate, and the reduced cost for retail operations “in territory” has made it much easier to roll out new network deals and offers.

Note: Carphone Warehouse are no doubt using TIBCO BusinessStudio to develop iProcess applications - so now is a good time to mention that BusinessStudio 3.2.0 is now shipping. Although this doesn’t cover CEP (or CEP-driven BPM), it does now include some iProcess Conductor (Gantt-based goal-driven BPM) features…