Tibco enters SA market

Johannesburg, 07 Oct 2004

Following its acquisition of local business integration software company, Staffware, Tibco Software is set to launch an official South African operation, making its full suite of products available to both the South African and African markets.

According to Mark Ehmke, MD of the newly formed Tibco Software SA, the acquisition happened from a position of strength within both companies, and "has led to the market leaders in business process management (BPM) and enterprise application integration being joined into a single, financially sound and rapidly growing organisation".

"Combining the two companies has proved to be a good fit, both in terms of products and our geographical spread," says Ehmke.

"The two product sets complement each other perfectly, and this has helped us to create a single solution for businesses in the enterprise backbone, BPM, business integration and business optimisation fields."

According to Ehmke, analysts have long defined BPM as comprising three elements, namely application integration, process automation and management and business activity monitoring.

"Until now, no single vendor has supplied a BPM solution that fulfils all three of these criteria, but following the merger of our two companies, we are now in a position to do just that."

The integration of Staffware`s products into the Tibco suite is to be approached in three phases.

In the first phase, existing products will be cross-used by customers. The second phase will include the merging of the technologies into a single platform, and should be complete by the end of 2005, while the final phase, to be completed by 2007, will see the two product sets becoming a single product.