Specialist
Former Sales Executive at Tibco Software Inc
Agenda
- Tibco's operating environment and broader BI (business intelligence) software category
- Competitive dynamics among Tibco, Tableau (NYSE: CRM), Qlik, PowerBI (NASDAQ: MSFT) and others
- Recently announced Blue Prism (LON: PRSM) merger and integration outlook, realising business synergies and customer resonance
- Outlook for Q4 2021 and beyond – impact and traction of product expansions and enhancements, plus upselling and cross-selling opportunities and potential model reorientation
Questions
1.
Could you give an overview of Tibco’s product offerings and the central value proposition and general use cases across its Connect, Unify and Predict portfolios?
2.
What key trends should investors monitor across Tibco’s operating environment? Are any industry headwinds or tailwinds front of mind?
3.
What are the customer adoption trends across Tibco’s many segments? Do these diversified offerings tend to resonate with the company’s purchasing habits? How should we assess demand, attraction and the opportunities it could pursue?
4.
How do you assess Tibco’s relative positioning vs vendors such as MuleSoft, Boomi or Informatica? Where is Tibco’s core business trending?
5.
How would you compare Tibco’s Predict portfolio to vendors such as Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft Power BI, given the company’s investment into the BI [business intelligence] and analytics market?
6.
You said Tibco has not been as successful with winning new business. In which scenarios does the company win new logos relative to its peers across the different use cases? Where is it experiencing traction with enterprise customers?
7.
What factors into Tibco’s ability to retain its existing business and logos? What’s the overall churn risk of the company’s offerings and what are the switching costs? What’s its ability to mitigate any future churn risk?
8.
What’s your outlook for Tibco’s potential churn risk? Could it improve, given you said the products are working and the company is functional at scale with enterprise customers? Could you balance that with the ROI situation you outlined around the ability to switch to a nimbler solution?
9.
What’s the potential for new entrants and disruptors, especially considering companies such as Alteryx, Palantir and C3 have some predictive analytics overlaps?
10.
What’s your outlook for open source and other low-cost integration tools potentially disrupting the iPaaS [integration platform-as-a-service] side?
11.
What’s the functionality and robustness of Tibco’s products and platforms? Are they differentiated from those of the company’s peers? Are they becoming more commoditised, where it will increasingly come down to sales and marketing execution?
12.
A lot of Tibco’s investment seems to have been in R&D. The company recently announced several product expansions across the portfolio, with updates on Spotfire, WebFocus, Data Science and Streaming all linking into the hyperconverged analytics experience. How might this impact its ability to differentiate itself and reignite potential new business wins? Will this resonate with customers wanting to upgrade or get new solutions, or might it come down to a lack of messaging and Tibco’s potential inability to be front of mind?
13.
Tibco’s merger with RPA [robotic process automation] vendor Blue Prism was announced in September 2021. What’s your outlook for the combined assets’ value? Could Tibco bring in some sales and marketing strengths from Blue Prism, as well as adding RPA to its existing process mining capabilities? How might this impact Tibco’s go-to-market and ability to attract new logos?
14.
How might Tibco’s existing customer base perceive the Blue Prism deal, given the cross-sell opportunities it presents? Do you expect it to be a boon to the company’s top-line expansion?
15.
What can we infer from Tibco’s previous acquisitions and integration execution? How might this factor into the company’s combination with Blue Prism? Tibco expects 1-2 years to be a reasonable time frame to realise some of the merger’s ROI. Does that align with previous acquisitions? How would you assess the longer-term tail?
16.
The Tibco-Blue Prism deal is being primarily funded with debt. Does the top-line opportunity outweigh the potential burden on Tibco? How should we assess any revenue potential in realising the synergies around cross-sell opportunities and potential new logo expansion in the long term?
17.
Can Tibco compete more on price when the company goes through any given RFP for potential scenarios? What’s driving its ability to make it to final evaluations or could it not bundle to try and attract customers this way?
18.
What might be the merger’s competitive impact or response, given Tibco will now play in the RPA market and bring competition against Automation Anywhere and UiPath? Might the company’s existing competitors branch into new segments?
19.
Could Tibco package all the new offerings for its existing customer base? Would that move the needle or are customer purchasing habits shifting away from wanting to stick with one vendor for everything?
20.
Tibco announced plans to heavily invest in its partner ecosystem, especially focusing on GSI [global system integrator], SaaS [software-as-a-service], API [application program interface] development integration and its OEM [original equipment manufacturer] relationships. Could this be a potential tailwind to the company’s sales competitiveness and drive new business expansion? Might it help it in the broader competitive landscape and its ability to differentiate and potentially win more?
21.
What is the weighting of the GSIs’ recommendations when considering the evaluations? Might trying to invest more heavily in the partner ecosystem bring Tibco to the table more often?
22.
How could Tibco lower product costs or the resource intensity to fully train GSIs to implement things at scale at a lesser cost? If this is a hurdle to winning more business through this channel, why hasn’t the company done this?
23.
How should we assess the value Tibco generates for customers relative to other offerings, balancing the cost vs ROI? Is the company effective at selling the key points to potential customers or do they get lost in the weeds?
24.
Why aren’t CIOs [Chief Information Officers] making a stronger push for Tibco if there is value generation around ROI from the product’s robustness? Are there any nuances to highlight depending on who is making the end decision? How might this play out?
25.
Tibco’s new logo acquisition has been fairly minimal. You said there could be a few in APAC but none in the core US market, so any potential organic revenue growth will likely be driven by cross-selling and upselling. How might this play out? Where is the company experiencing traction with cross-sell and upsell opportunities within its existing customer base?
26.
What would you say are the biggest risks and opportunities for Tibco? How might this play into potential best- and worst-case scenarios? Might things stay the same or deteriorate? Could the company turn the ship and execute on the longer-term strategies?
27.
What would you like to highlight in closing around Tibco and the broader market?
