TIBCO Software Inc. (Nasdaq: TIBX ) continued its market leadership in the fast-growing Complex Event Processing (CEP) space, according to a new report from IDC. TIBCO thus marked another year as the undisputed CEP leader, with a market share of 40.2 percent — twice the share of its closest competitor-while experiencing 52 percent year-over-year growth, according to the IDC study.

“CEP is the fastest-growing segment of the global event-driven middleware market,” according to Maureen Fleming, director of IDC’s BPM and middleware research program. “We expect this growth to continue as enterprises build event-driven applications that, in essence, act as real-time navigation systems for business.”

Reference (PRNewsWire):

TIBCO Leads Fast-Growing CEP Space, Says Leading IT Analyst Firm

Even thought TIBCO’s BusinessEvents does not yet support Bayesian Classifiers, Artificial Neural Networks and other advanced decision support algorithms, it is just a matter of time before TIBCO will add these advanced features “out of the box”.  On the other hand, the extensible nature of TIBCO’s BE makes it possible to add probabalistic computing functionality, however this requires quite a lot of programming and integration work.

When I see a great release like this for TIBCO, it makes me a little nostalgic for “the good old days” travelling the world in the front of the aircraft for TIBCO.   TIBCO has a rich and diverse customer base.  This customer base includes financial services companies; however, TIBCO is much less dependent on financial services than other event processing companies.   So, with TIBCO you not only get great technology, but rock-solid stability in an unstable and uncertain business world.

As a side note, an S&P analyst recently downgraded TIBCO’s stock (TIBX), primarily due to chao in the financial services sector.    Because of TIBCO’s global reach and stability, plus forward vision, advanced technologies and many years of commericial success, the S&P downgrade will create a buying opportunity for TIBCO stock.

We all know that Oracle just bought BEA.

Personally, I would have recommended Oracle to buy TIBCO instead of BEA. TIBCO has great technology and their software stack is richer and more diverse that BEA’s. TIBCO spends a lot of  development resources on their graphical user interfaces and design-time and modelling environment to make business integration very easy.  TIBCO’s stockholders, like most great companies with a long history of the same executive management and management style, would greatly benefit from the acquisition.

Citigroup’s John Reilly Walsh upgraded TIBCO (TIBX) shares to Buy from Hold based on Oracle’s purchase of BEA. John thinks TIBCO, the last real middleplayer on the block, will also be purchased, and names IBM as the most likely candidate, “but adds that SAP, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Oracle (ORCL), Sun Microsystems (JAVA), EMC and Cisco (CSCO) all could potentially be interested.”

If Oracle bought TIBCO, a very interesting idea, that would leave Oracle the King of Integration (KOI). I don’t think HP, EMC or Cisco would want to purchase a company that is so fundamentally different than their core business.

This begs the question if Sun would want to buy TIBCO and challenge Oracle now that Sun has purchased MySQL?

So the three most likely scenarios are:

• IBM buys TIBCO
• Sun buys TIBCO
• Oracle buys TIBCO

In my opinion, the most interesting scenario would be Sun following their purchase of MySQL with a purchase of TIBCO. This could create a strong competitor to Oracle.

On the other hand, Oracle would benefit from the purchase, if only a defensive mechanism against a Sun/MySQL/TIBCO triple-threat, and they would get great technology at the same time.

I would be surprised if IBM buys TIBCO, but if they do, this would also keep things interesting!

From a cultural perspective, the TIBCO culture and the Sun culture are the best match.   I don’t think that the SAP or  IBM cultures are very suitable for TIBCO employess.  So, if you toss in the cultural perspective, Sun, cash rich and in acquisition mode, seems the most likely candidate to buy TIBCO.

I was looking at some of my favorite CEP companies this morning and noticed that Goldman Sachs analyst Derek Bingham just downgraded vendor TIBCO Software (TIBX) to Sell.

According to Bingham, here,

… customers will move away from buying more expensive “best-of-breed” offerings, like Tibco’’s products, and more toward buying less expensive “good enough” substitutes that are bundled with broader solutions from the likes of IBM, Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.

At the time of this post, TIBCO was down around 5 percent in premarket trading.