TIBCO Streaming

TIBCO Streaming is a streaming analytics product (and the successor to TIBCO StreamBase) that strives to help you to better connect, understand, and interact with your streaming data. Moreover, it does not stand alone: it is a part of TIBCO’s broader suite of analytics – or, in TIBCO’s parlance, ‘connected intelligence’ – offerings that, taken together, provide an end-to-end solution for enterprise analytics and BI (Business Intelligence). This ties neatly into the company’s approach to streaming analytics as a whole: specifically, that it is best treated as one part of an encompassing, holistic analytics infrastructure, and one part of the broader analytics story, than as a single, perhaps even siloed, capability.

Major features include the on-demand delivery of streaming services suitable for consumption by any type of user, regardless of technical expertise, thus democratising streaming data; significant support for integrating machine learning with your streaming data, with additional support planned to further enable streaming data science; a cloud-native architecture that includes elastic scaling, automated recovery, and support for Kubernetes; consumption-based pricing; and, of course, the product’s signature visualised streaming analytics. A variety of deployment options are available, including cloud environments (notably AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, and OpenShift, as well as TIBCO Cloud) and as a Docker image.

Other TIBCO products contribute to the company’s streaming analytics offering by adding other types of analytics – predictive analytics, embedded analytics, complex event processing, and so on – to the mix. TIBCO Spotfire, which is frequently delivered alongside TIBCO Streaming, works particularly well as a BI platform that provides simultaneous (and, on your part, almost effortless) access to both historic and streaming data via a friendly user interface.

Customer Quotes

“We automated the Melbourne Airport with TIBCO [Streaming] in 12 weeks with 6 people, and release new innovations every 2 weeks.”
Melbourne Airport

“We’ve been able to take our 500 million messages and cull them down to 1,000 meaningful alerts a day that can be managed very efficiently and proactively. That is not something we could have done previously.”
Convergex

Streaming is a high-performance platform for rapidly building and deploying real time streaming analytics applications. It enables a variety of different user personas, ranging from professional developers to highly knowledgeable but non-technical domain experts, to build these applications using a browser-based, low/no-code visual interface, as shown in Figure 1. The ease of use this approach provides allows all of the aforementioned personas to leverage self-service streaming data as part of their analytics projects without undue difficulty, thus creating additional value from your data, reducing the time spent developing apps, and democratising your streaming capabilities.

Fig 1 – Creating an app in TIBCO Streaming

A wide variety of accelerators for Streaming are freely available via the TIBCO community. Each one consists of a collection of pre-built components that have been optimised for a particular use case. Examples include financial fraud, case management, and insurance pricing. Notably, a number of accelerators are built to support the Internet of Things (IoT), including the Connected Vehicles Accelerator, and the IoT Drilling Accelerator. Combined with the embedded BI and analytics capabilities TIBCO provides, and the option to deploy on the edge, this allows Streaming to perform well in IoT environments.

Although Streaming integrates with several other TIBCO products, its integration with Spotfire, TIBCO’s general analytics platform, is particularly strong. For instance, Spotfire offers a shared environment for storing, managing and deploying assets across both products. Notably, this includes the application of predictive, machine learning models to streaming data, deployed within Streaming itself. On that front, Streaming supports models written in Java, Python and R (the latter via an accelerator), as well as PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language) and SparkML.

Fig 2 – A Spotfire analytics dashboard

For a further example of this integration, Live Datamart, previously a separate product but now part of Streaming, is an in-memory data warehouse equipped with a continuous query processing engine that drives alerting, user actions, and decision rules that can automatically take action under specified conditions. More to the point, it also provides live, real-time visualisations of your streaming data that can be accessed and assembled into dashboards using Spotfire (see Figure 2).

As a streaming analytics solution, Streaming is remarkable for two core reasons. First, by adopting low/no-code design principles and a friendly user interface, it makes the development of streaming apps faster, easier, and above all, more accessible. This enables self-service streaming app creation, in particular for business users and domain experts, who would otherwise typically have to go through a lengthy back-and-forth with IT to get a new streaming app built (by which point the window of opportunity for the original use case may have closed). In turn, this should allow you to analyse and react to streaming data with much greater agility.

Second, TIBCO places the emphasis not (or at least, not entirely) on streaming analytics as a solution in and of itself, but as one part of a comprehensive analytics suite. This is supported by the company’s other products, many of which tightly integrate with Streaming. As already discussed, Spotfire is particularly notable in this regard. This is a good approach: ultimately, analytics is about generating actionable insights, and it stands to reason that a more comprehensive and connected analytics pipeline is going to generate more useful, more complete, and more accurate information from which to generate those insights.

There are other reasons to care about TIBCO’s offering, of course: these are merely the most major. Other notable advantages include the product’s support for machine learning, its suitability for deployment to the edge or the cloud, and its range of accelerators, which frequently enable significantly greater time-to-value.

The Bottom Line

TIBCO Streaming makes it easy to build streaming applications. It is a complete streaming analytics platform, and together with the rest of the company’s ecosystem, can play an integral part in a comprehensive and holistic analytics solution. In short, it is certainly worth your consideration.