Tibco’s acquisition of Spotfire last year is driving a healthy increase in the company’s life science revenues, a company official told BioInform this week.
Roger Oberg, vice president of product strategy for Tibco’s Spotfire unit, said that the company expects that “the life sciences business is going to grow for the Spotfire [line],” and estimated that the Spotfire life sciences business “is going to grow over 30 percent in 2008.”
In late December, Tibco reported that life science revenue — composed entirely of Spotfire product sales — represented 5 percent of its total fourth-quarter revenue of $186.1 million, or $9.3 million. This was a 24-percent increase over Spotfire’s third-quarter revenues of around $7 million [BioInform 11-02-07].
Tibco — which provides business process-management software across a range of verticals including finance, manufacturing, and telecommunications —did not record any life science revenues in the comparable year-ago quarters.
Tibco acquired Spotfire for $195 million in cash last June. At the time, Tibco said the purchase was a “natural extension” of its business strategy “that allows us to offer customers next-generation business intelligence solutions for data access and analysis.” [BioInform 05-04-07]
In a conference call to discuss financial results for the three months ended Nov. 30, 2007, Tibco CFO Murray Rode said Spotfire-related sales “exceeded our expectations, again, this quarter and represented stellar efforts on the part of the Spotfire team.”
Rode added that two Spotfire deals signed in the fourth quarter were together worth more than $1 million.
Oberg told BioInform this week that the company is measuring its life sciences uptick by new license growth, but declined to elaborate.
He said continued growth will be reflected by the number of Tibco and Spotfire products the company plans to integrate, though he conceded that this integration would be targeted more toward the company’s core customer base in manufacturing and financial services.
“Tibco does not have significant presence in the life sciences yet,” he said.
He added that over time, the integration of Spotfire and Tibco products will include the marriage of Spotfire’s “real-time data distribution” capabilities with the Tibco service-oriented architecture portfolio.
“I consider the real-time event processing technology a major opportunity for Spotfire and the traditional Tibco technologies to come together,” Oberg said.
“If you think about … that being a constant streaming source of data to Spotfire, then on the Spotfire side we can do some things to enable that real-time data to be analyzed. So that’s what we are working on,” Oberg said.