UPDATED 12:24 EDT / JUNE 17 2019

CLOUD

At TIBCO Now, a corporate cultural innovation shift on the wind

We can talk about innovation in business terms of its impact on revenue and profit, or in productivity terms of agile releases and faster resolutions. But the most sustainable class of innovation comes from a cultural shift in the mindset of organizations.

Though culture implies warm and fuzzy elements, don’t let me make it sound easy to pull off. Any cultural innovation shift must prove itself worthy beyond the clinical business imperatives of growth, and serve many masters. It must repeatably find new ways to delight customers. It must make employees and partners desire the opportunity to work with you. It must even benefit the world outside your organization.

I attended the TIBCO Now Chicago summit last week and was struck by the recurrence of this cultural innovation shift, as I heard from technology leaders in attendance.

Expanding the empire with cultural ambassadorship at Caesars

I got to interview Les Ottolenghi, executive vice president and chief information officer at Caesars Entertainment Corp., one of the world’s largest hospitality companies with more than 50 resorts globally.

“All of the innovation happening with our infrastructure in the back end is really about evolving our business model, and delivering the customer experience of the future,” he said.

This “casino of the future” isn’t about table games and slots, though they’ll always be there. For instance, across the Las Vegas hospitality industry, the revenue percentage from gambling has dropped from 51 percent in 1998 to about 28 percent today.

Caesars is pushing to serve a new generation of “digital natives” with mobile-first gaming interaction, live talent competitions, and immersive “fan caves,” virtual experience surroundings and streaming media studios that attract partners from both real sports and the rapidly growing e-sports category.

Yet to make this transformation, Ottolenghi and his team have slogged through six major and 15 minor transformation projects on an amazingly ancient spaghetti architecture supporting millions of loyalty customers, including a 45-year-old casino management server.

They started at the service bus, gradually consuming or replacing core back-end systems with newer SaaS providers, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud for customer relationship management and offers, a new Adobe Systems Inc. content manager, new Infor Inc. hotel management system, private cloud analytics packages and even a blockchain loyalty points system developed with Microsoft Corp. TIBCO’s Cloud Mashery was employed atop the messaging layer to allow secure API interaction with outside mobile devices and virtual rooms.

“We just launched the Blackfire project in partnership with the UNLV hospitality research program,” Ottolenghi said. “It’s the first 200,000-square-foot building which is the complete digital twin of a casino: gaming, hotel, food and beverage and retail, where we can run every build/deploy of a new project before we roll it out to resorts, for instance the Kind Heaven restaurant where you can dine in simulated settings from the 1920s, or in the future, with space aliens.”

Talk about a test culture! It’s like putting a whole casino in a wind tunnel.

But this cultural shift isn’t just about creating cool visuals and buyer incentives. With ever-increasing cybersecurity threats, social media harassment and the ever-present possibility of gun violence, Ottolenghi and his team are also highly motivated to improve the data privacy and physical security of every employee and customer they interact with.

“We’re using a cognitive architecture, and facial recognition to work on building security as a platform, so customers can be safer whether in our environments or in our competitor’s environments,” he said.

Executing microservices at scale at T-Mobile

Want to attract and retain more customers? Treat the delivery of everything customers could possibly want from your company as an agile application development challenge. That’s dyed into the magenta culture of T-Mobile as it aggressively makes moves to grow its market share.

But wait. To do that, you would also need to attract and retain great developers and creators. You might pay them well, but simply throwing money at a talent shortage is unsustainable in the long term if the right culture of innovation isn’t in place.

“What I love about going to work every day, is learning something new every day, rather than working on monotonous things,” says T-Mobile DevOps leader Sagar Khaire. “I get to work on microservices architectures, enabling customer functions like activations, bill payments and upgrades. If a customer interacts with T-Mobile, that’s an application that will eventually touch our layer. And on a good day, we are processing more than 250 million transactions.”

Over the last couple of years, T-Mobile has impressively upgraded to a 100% container and microservices architecture, including perhaps the first major enterprise migration to TIBCO’s recently released BusinessWorks CE (or Cloud Edition), deploying at scale to containers running on the company’s own bare metal private cloud infrastructure.

But things weren’t always so great. All-hands monthly release processes on weekend nights that could result in downtime bug-fix firefights. Issues dealing with demand spikes, especially during peak holiday seasons when hundreds of thousands of orders could flow in for gift accounts and devices.

“We had more than 900 applications running through TIBCO and Springboot back in the day, so if one group was having a problem, they would call the ‘middleware team’ to make adjustments, which created technical debt,” Khaire said. “Now that we are truly embracing DevOps approaches and automation atop cloud-native infrastructure, we can just call ourselves a Digital Services group.”

Now T-Mobile supports an ever-increasing transaction load, while now conducting as many as 20 microservices releases a weekday, with fully automated blue/green ramp up of each new customer feature.  No more Saturday night redeye sessions happening here.

The culture has to be good at Goya

When you see a can of chickpeas from Goya in the store, it may not amount to a hill of beans in your mind, but it is North America’s second-leading consumer packaged food brand with more than 4,800 unique products, nearing completion of its own goal to double a business in eight years that took 80 years to build from scratch.

Coming from an entrepreneurial background, Suvajit Basu, head of information technology at Goya Foods Inc., came on board with this family-owned company 10 years ago, inspired by the company’s motto that ‘It has to be good” and the growth challenge he was given.

“I think of paper as sand in the machine,” Basu said. “If we want to double our growth in eight years, we need an end-to-end digital process. In every area, whether we are sourcing, making, or delivering direct to the bodega, we need the best of breed technology. So we started modernizing from the facility and warehouse outward.”

He described a massive amount of data accompanying every process in the company’s business, with more than 2.5 million sales transactions a month and 100,000 daily delivery fulfillments, tracking all the way down to each individual chickpea being analyzed for quality.

“We chose to focus our integration on bringing down the total number of management reports to less than 150, and sharing them in a secure, multicloud environment,” Basu said.

But it wasn’t the mobile delivery tracking apps, mobile device management and analytics improvements Basu seemed most proud of. It is in Goya’s ability to deliver quality foods that meet the specific tastes and traditions of an ethnically and regionally diverse community of customers.

“What you put in your mouth – what could be more important than that?” he said.

TIBCO re-messages itself with a culture of openness

Our hosts at TIBCO, whom I partnered with at least 20 years ago when it was simply known for a faster message bus, have built and acquired a lot of new capabilities since then. But with TIBCO’s enterprise service bus legacy products still a backbone for many large enterprises, the company under new Chief Executive Dan Streetman (pictured) is taking great care to wriggle free of a simplistic integration pipe categorization and get ahead of the cloud-native cultural mindset.

I visited with Rob Zazueta, TIBCO’s director of digital platform strategy, about his own experience coming to TIBCO through their acquisition of the Mashery business unit from Intel Corp. about five years ago, and he seemed quite at home with the ability not only to advise customers on API-driven development but to be part of that shift to container-delivered, open source, cloud-native architecture within TIBCO.

“We’re about opening all your existing systems and making them feel agile – using data virtualization and model hosting with APIs for apps that break into new markets, without having to disrupt your legacy,” Zazueta said. “If you do this well enough, your development and infrastructure teams can adhere to a new contract with customers that grows in trust over time.”

TIBCO does have a unique way of showing solutions as combinations of open-source pieces that snap together to fulfill certain customer plays. They’ve committed to delivering all of their integration, data and analytics solutions into true hybrid IT environments, whether interacting with cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google, or supporting on-premises container and microservices deployments that can scale next to private cloud resources and legacy systems.

The Intellyx take

A cultural innovation shift never comes easy.

The fact that Chicago arose to such industrial and intellectual prominence on the often cold, windy shores of Lake Michigan in the middle of the continent is a testament to a culture of innovation, so it was a fitting venue.

Yes, TIBCO shared new product announcements, such as native support for GraphQL and event-based processing. But the big difference at this event was the way their customers speak for themselves as they proceed along their unique cultural paths toward digital transformation.

(Jason English is principal analyst and chief marketing officer at Intellyx LLC, an analyst firm that advises enterprises on their digital transformation initiatives, and publishes the weekly Cortex and BrainCandy newsletters. At the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. Microsoft and AWS are former Intellyx customers. TIBCO covered Jason English’s expenses for the event, a common industry practice.)

Photo: TIBCO

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