But it is not just data at rest that is in question. The need for big data in motion is growing, viewers claim. For its part, middleware stalwart Tibco sees big data, coupled with event processing and fast messaging, as a route to greater market penetration.

“We kind of own the big data problem as it relates to real-time events,” Tibco’s Vivek Ranadive told SearchSOA.com on a recent call. He maintains that even common tasks like pizza delivery – granted, for national chains – will be affected by big data. “When customers inadvertently get cold pizza, the company can pick that up,” and make things better with a free pizza, a coupon or what have you.

“When you think about big data, it is about running twenty-first-century risk. The planet needs an ‘eventing’ platform,” said Ranadive, author of “The Power of Now” (1999) and “The Two-Second Advantage” (2011).

The Tibco event architecture plays a role in a recent user story on SearchSOA.com. Our site recently profiled shipping giant OOCL’s Matt Rosen who shows how challenging markets can be, and how pivotal well-managed technology is in addressing those markets.

Shipping companies were in a tough bind when the 2008 downturn struck, and the going was not easier when recession hit big European markets. OOCL’s performance outpaced competitors, and in some significant part due to Rosen’s application development team, which better enabled efficient business processes for the global shipper.

Among a host of technologies Rosen’s OOCL crew employed was an event processing engine from Tibco Software. OOCL’s habitat – the shipping industry – is among those that advanced middleware maker Tibco is counting on to take it beyond its Wall Street techno roots. – Jack Vaughan

Increases were seen across the playing field, with perpetual middleware giant IBM gaining the largest growth margin, adding 2% in market share, and going from 30.6% in 2009 to 32.6% in 2011. Despite trailing IBM by nearly half, distant runner up Oracle also added to its market share by 0.8%, going  from 16.2% to 17% in the same period. Other companies not amongst the top five vendors lost nearly 4% of their market share.

A series of acquisitions, totaling $1.2 billion has led to an even greater concentration of the market amongst the top five vendors. Through these acquisitions suite vendors swallowed up independent companies. The result is IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Software AG and TIBCO now control 61% of the AIM market. This figure is a 4% increase from last year’s 57%. North America and Western Europe remain the two largest regional, situated just ahead of Japan and Asia/Pacific.

Growing technology sectors include spaces like SOA governance as well as open source technologies.

As cloud computing is really just the next evolutionary step for grid – at which DataSynapse is an old hand – the move is likely meant to strengthen the capabilities of Tibco’s Silver cloud application delivery product. While Silver already allows developers to deliver new applications onto cloud platforms, DataSynapse’s FabricServer software will give it the ability to deploy a wide variety of existing applications to cloud infrastructures.

Tibco’s strengths in public cloud will find in DataSynapse’s internal cloud expertise very complimentary. This is an important step when considering the push in modern application development to explore private cloud deployments in the very near future.