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Pros and Cons of Tibco BPM — with a Tibco Alternative

Profile Photo of Amit Kothari
By Amit Kothari
Updated November 2, 2024
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Tibco

This is about the strengths and weaknesses of Tibco BPM along with a viable alternative for Tibco (Tallyfy). Much of it is borrowed from Gartner, with some portions edited and cleaned up.

TIBCO Software made significant changes in its product strategy in the past year, including a shift toward more use of cloud platforms and combining some offerings, including ActiveMatrix (AMX), Nimbus and tibbr with other TIBCO products, to cut the number of SKUs and reduce marketing, sales and support complexity. TIBCO’s organization has also been streamlined following its acquisition by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in December 2014. This analysis centers on TIBCO ActiveMatrix (AMX) BPM 4.0, TIBCO Business Studio 4.0, TIBCO AMX BPM Spotfire 7.1, TIBCO BusinessEvents 5.2.1, TIBCO AMX BusinessWorks 6.2.2, TIBCO Nimbus 9.5.2, TIBCO JasperReports 6.1.1, TIBCO StreamBase 7.5.4 + TIBCO Live Datamart 2.0.4 and tibbr 6.0.1.

Strengths of TIBCO BPM

  • TIBCO offers first-rate real-time analytics and operational intelligence, including process intelligence BAM (in AMX BPM); business intelligence BAM, visual data discovery and predictive analytics (in Spotfire and R); business rule processing (in AMX Decisions); two stream analytics CEP platforms (BusinessEvents and StreamBase); and other capabilities. The tight integration of Spotfire with AMX BPM and BusinessEvents is a unique advantage.
  • TIBCO’s traditional strength in application integration is based on its enterprise service bus (AMX BusinessWorks), message-oriented middleware (Enterprise Message Service and FTL), and off-the-shelf adapters into applications and other platforms, alongside its newly acquired API Management offering (from its acquisition of Mashery).
  • TIBCO offers improved case management support and multiple ways to implement sophisticated forms of event-driven BPM, leveraging combinations of business rules, CEP, and AMX BPM for a variety of demanding digital business and IoT applications.

Weaknesses of TIBCO BPM

  • TIBCO’s product line is powerful but overly complicated and expensive for most small and midsize BPM projects unless they require a high level of analytics or real-time integration among multiple applications or SaaS offerings (such conditions are found, for example, especially in digital business transformation projects).
  • In locations outside of North America, some customers report inconsistent support.
  • AMX BPM is best-suited for systematic, IT-centric development projects. It is less effective for business-user-led projects because of its weak capabilities for high-productivity application authoring.

Alternative to Tibco BPM — Tallyfy

Problem — BPMN makes modelling far too complicated

A great alternative to Tibco’s BPM would be the ability to model processes simply. Just because you have some big BPMN model doesn’t make it clever or useful. In the end, people can/will still have to actually do the process, which comes down to email/spreadsheets (unless you want a 6-month IT project). It’s ridiculous to use BPMN in today’s age — where people collaborate and don’t follow flowcharts anyway.

Problem — only IT and business analysts can map processes

Tallyfy is the only tool that enables anyone to map out a process — since most people understand the simplicity of the tool in 60 seconds. The alternative to Tibco BPM is not really an alternative at all — it’s an inevitable switch that business users crave.

Problem — nobody looks at process maps while they work

Tallyfy provides self-service simplicity to workflows, along with the power you need.

Consider a beautiful alternative to Tibco BPM — Tallyfy

It integrates to everything, and it works for everyone. Take a look at Tallyfy – as a viable, user-friendly alternative to Tibco.

Can you tolerate the pain and cost of each person in your company wasting ~2 hours a day on busywork?

Is legacy BPM actually going to work for business users?

Tallyfy is the only process tool that anyone can understand in 60 seconds. Legacy BPM systems can take 6 months to deploy - if they work at all.

In the last 10 years - amazing changes happened to business software. "Old BPM" software is tired and broken. It never worked for business users. Here's why.

  • Users are now deciding to buy software themselves. Old BPM was bought by your IT department, who didn't generally care about user experience - as long as it was made by a large/boring company.
  • Cloud tools are now free to try by anyone, anytime. With Old BPM you had to call sales and wait for 50 questions just to look at it and finally decide it sucks.
  • People want to share workflows with clients. With Old BPM you were stuck with trying to automate internal processes only. Your clients would be very scared and run a mile from it.
  • People expect to integrate cloud tools without IT. With Old BPM you had get engineers to write code to make a simple integration. That's now become a drag-and-drop service.
  • People expect to work on phones. This means giant, clunky flowcharts in Old BPM are dead - because they don't fit on your phone's screen - and only define "the perfect process".
  • People are tired of flowcharts. Old BPM was all about the high priest telling you how a process can/will be done, and you would obey. Now - modern workers and teams are paid to collaborate.
  • People expect all the benefits of the cloud. Old BPM was never cloud-born and was never designed for the cloud. And that creates a massive bunch of missed opportunities.
  • Companies of all sizes need process management - and never had it. Since Old BPM was so expensive and complicated, only large companies could afford it. The rest of us were left out.
  • People are excited about AI - but confused about where to begin. With Old BPM you have zero chance of using AI without an army of engineers. With cloud-born systems like Tallyfy - it's childs' play to use any AI you like to run amazing automations for photos, voice, video and more.
  • The most important part is this - what does Tallyfy offer that BPMN (used by legacy BPM systems) does not? It's true - Tallyfy actually has things you need - that no BPM can offer. Read more about it here

See how to map BPMN to Tallyfy

Here's the life you don't want if you're an operations or IT leader!
This is legacy Business Process Management
Tallyfy vs. Complex, Legacy Business Process Management Suites

Legacy BPM

1Learn how to use it in 60 seconds.

Legacy BPM

2Integrates natively into existing apps.

Legacy BPM

3Anyone can capture any kind of know-how.

Legacy BPM

4Built cloud-native and mobile-first.

Legacy BPM

5Captures non-process knowledge (snippets).

Legacy BPM

6Share processes with clients.

Legacy BPM

Can you tolerate the pain and cost of each person in your company wasting ~2 hours a day on busywork?

Is this post written for a search engine or for you?

Many B2B cloud software companies invest in blog posts in the hope of ranking high on search engines like Google. What they’re doing is writing articles around keywords, which are terms customers are likely to search for on Google. The posts don’t offer valuable information or make any sense.

But then if you’re reading something that doesn’t make sense, how are you supposed to make informed buying decisions?

We have a lot to say about workflow and business processes. We truly believe in continuous improvement. But it’s not really about us. We publish these articles to help you find Tallyfy, and to provide you with information that will help you make informed buying decisions.

Ready to automate your workflows? Check out Tallyfy.

How exactly do we conduct research?

We research topics down to the bone. We nitpick, we argue about what to keep and what to throw out. It’s a lot of work. We consult academic sources for scholarly citations to support our points. We gather data to summarize particular points. At Tallyfy – 3 independent experts validate and edit every article from the draft stage. That includes verifying facts and their sources.

Why did we write this article?

Tallyfy believes in helpful and authoritative content that helps people. Our customers requested us to write about this topic so we attempted to put together the highest quality article available anywhere – that’s our goal. Work like this takes a lot of effort. If you liked this article please share the link with your coworkers via email, or on LinkedIn.

About the author - Amit Kothari

Amit Kothari
Amit is the CEO of Tallyfy. He's a workflow expert and specializes in process automation and the next generation of business process management in the post-flowchart age.

He has decades of consulting experience in task and workflow automation, continuous improvement (all the flavors) and AI-driven workflows for small and large companies. Amit did a Computer Science degree at the University of Bath and moved from the UK to St. Louis, MO in 2014. He loves watching American robins and their nesting behaviors!

Follow Amit on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, X (Twitter) or YouTube

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