Enterprise software seller Tibco tries its hand at marketing

Tibco is turning its guns toward marketing.

Today, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company — best known for its infrastructure and business-intelligence software — is announcing its Engage software as a service, designed to motivate consumers with real-time and predictive personalization.

Built on the company’s “Fast Data” platform, and using its loyalty management and workplace-oriented social media tools, Engage is Tibco’s response to chief marketing officers’ (CMOs) new budgetary powers — and to the opportunity that lies between physical and virtual stores.

There’s a “huge movement in budgets that CMOs are taking from CIOs [chief information officers],” Leandro Perez, product marketing director, told VentureBeat.

“The CMO is [making] a lot more technical decisions,” he said, and they’re “coming to us, wanting us to piece this thing together.”

A differentiator from the other marketing platforms out there, Perez told us, is that Engage is “one solution, [and] you can’t get [one part] without the others.” That’s opposed to a more a-la-carte offering from such marketing clouds as, say, Salesforce.com.

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New Tibco capabilities in Engage include a drag-and-drop user interface so a subscribing company can design the engagement flow and an engagement engine to make product recommendations for the customer. A new behavioral engine builds on Tibco’s analytical capability to utilize historical and real-time data for predicting behavior. The Tibco social media product has been expanded to allow subscribers to launch their own private, branded community.

Perez noted that the company, which has had a loyalty management offering, “has never had something aimed squarely at marketing.”

One opportunity that Tibco hopes to pursue is a much-discussed frontier in marketing — the real-time connection for customers moving between virtual and physical stores.

“If this was happening,” he said, “stores would be getting push notifications” when a customer who has been on a web site recently, or who has purchased from the store before, enters the premises.

“It’s not happening,” Perez said. “If I go to someone’s website and then someone’s [physical] store, there’s no connection.

“We’re able to piece that together in real time, and [add the element] of customer loyalty.”