TIBCO has a lot of Analytics and Data products. One of their acquisitions, called Spotfire, is actually a really good product.
Over the last few years they've also acquired a lot of Data Science companies, but it always felt like they were bargain shopping and acquiring companies nobody else wanted to buy.
Honestly, I pity Spotfire. IME it's the best out of all the products in that space (e.g. Tableau, PowerBI, etc) and is much better for actually Analyzing data in comparison to other products it competes with. But they got acquired by TIBCO, who basically did a great job of losing the mindshare race against Tableau. I feel like some other company would have done a better job with Spotfire.
Citrix does desktop virtualization. Back when I was involved with using their stuff (20 years ago), it was a lot faster for global users to connect to our Citrix server to run client/server apps than to run them over the WAN.
Tibco does/did middleware for n-tier applications. Back when I used it (again 20 years ago) it worked, and was relatively painless.
Tibco is short for “the information bus company”. They practically invented Enterprise integration in large businesses, esp stock exchanges and banks, with a need for high reliability. These days Tibco is largely considered “legacy”. I’m surprised that VCs would see value in them apart from their Rolodex.
Tibco is owned by Private Equity, not VCs. Very different type of companies. VCs own a company on its way up, PE onws its way down. Some times a company is sold immediately from VCs to PE. In some rear occasions a company owned by PE can go public: e.g. Dynatrace, TeamViewer.
Yup. When I was a junior engineer, I was working for a bank and the various teams were all blaming each other about high latency in the stack, which involved Tibco Rendezvous. Basically, a way to distribute market data over multicast. They blamed Rendezvous, they blamed the network hardware, they blamed everything except their spreadsheets. (Yes, the tech stack at the time was spreadsheet <-> spreadsheet over multicast.) Anyway, I wrote a small Perl application that measured the end-to-end latency (when market data changed, vs when the published output changed) in addition to network induced latency (basically echo packets; write something out, see when it came back over the link). What the data showed was that the data processing spreadsheet introduced tons of random latency, and the network was totally fine. I sent that up the chain and the bug in the spreadsheet was found almost immediately, solving a multi-month blame game in hours.
Over the last few years they've also acquired a lot of Data Science companies, but it always felt like they were bargain shopping and acquiring companies nobody else wanted to buy.
Honestly, I pity Spotfire. IME it's the best out of all the products in that space (e.g. Tableau, PowerBI, etc) and is much better for actually Analyzing data in comparison to other products it competes with. But they got acquired by TIBCO, who basically did a great job of losing the mindshare race against Tableau. I feel like some other company would have done a better job with Spotfire.