Alan Ho is an experienced business-to-business (B2B) marketing veteran with over 20 years in the Information Technology industry. He is the Senior Director of Marketing for Asia Pacific and Japan at Tibco.
Based in Singapore, he is responsible for and oversees TIBCO’s overall brand development and messaging within Asia. His mandate also includes product positioning and customer retention strategies in the region. A firm believer in innovation, he is an advocate on utilizing analytics to transform the way leads are generated and augmenting intelligence to create that exclusive customer experience.
Prior to joining TIBCO, Alan was the Asia Pacific lead at Intel Corporation where he was responsible for influencing and guiding business processes and policies for lead generation, demand generation, and event activities working across various industries.
He also spent eight years at Red Hat Asia Pacific where he held various senior marketing roles and most recently, director of program marketing. During his stint at Red Hat Asia Pacific, he was instrumental in driving key marketing strategies across various sectors that generated significant revenues for the company.
An avid marathoner, Alan has participated in races across cities such as Seoul, Istanbul, Ho Chi Minh, and Liverpool. He holds a master’s degree in Business Administration from Singapore Management University.
In this interview, Alan shares his insights on modern BI-analytics technology and how Tibco is advancing natural language and augmented intelligence. Additionally, he talks about the Snowflake integration launch and how businesses can manage data at scale.
DANNI WHITE: Who is TIBCO and what does your role involve?
ALAN HO: TIBCO Software fuels digital business by enabling better decisions and faster, smarter actions through the TIBCO Connected Intelligence Cloud. From APIs and systems to devices and people, we interconnect everything, capture data in real-time wherever it is, and augment the intelligence of your business through analytical insights. Thousands of customers around the globe rely on us to build compelling experiences, energize operations, and propel innovation.
Through the Connected Intelligence, we connect any application, device or data source. We unify all data for better access, trust, and control. Lastly, we augment by capturing and processing information to make faster decisions.
As the senior director of marketing for Asia Pacific and Japan for TIBCO Software, my responsibility is to provide direction, guidance, and leadership to the department in the region. I am also responsible for and oversee TIBCO’s overall brand development and messaging within Asia.
My mandate also includes product positioning and customer retention strategies in the region. As a firm believer in innovation, I advocate utilizing analytics to transform the way leads are generated and augmenting intelligence to create that exclusive customer experience.
DW: How is the company keeping pace with modern BI-analytics technologies?
AH: According to Top Trends to Watch in Analytics through 2020, Innovation in analytics and business intelligence (BI) is a must-have for companies trying to ensure a successful future in the digital age. For organizations and enterprises looking to innovate and keep pace with the ever-evolving field of analytics, understanding the trends that will have the biggest impact is critical.
Here are the top four trends that have emerged:
- Smarter Analytics: solutions today need to be infused with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and Natural Language querying for better decision making
- Data Wrangling: organizations need the power to wrangle, tweak, or move data even at the final stages of finishing a project to keep things moving forward
- Collaboration: growing analytics teams are widening to include non-experts and encouraging and enabling diversity of insight on projects is increasingly important
- Outcome focus: operationalizing analytics, pushing it out into the field for use, managing it, and governing it, is vital to any successful AI or ML initiative
DW: In what ways, are you advancing with natural language and augmented intelligence?
AH: We recently announced the A(X) Experience for TIBCO Spotfire®, an industry-first, AI-driven analytics experience, late last year. This fuses agile data exploration with natural language processing (NLP), machine learning recommendations, and model-based authoring, adding native support for real-time streaming data. This experience will allow users to humanize their data and information, allowing them to make better decisions, faster.
DW: Last month, TIBCO announced Snowflake integration to deliver analytics to cloud-native customers. How is this integration helping customers gain the most out of their data?
AH: With the new native TIBCO Spotfire connector for Snowflake, TIBCO now offers customers enhanced data-access capabilities, enabling users to continue to scale their analytics workloads, while maintaining high-performance levels and reducing costs. By integrating with Snowflake, Spotfire® can easily handle a heavy ETL (extract, transform, and load) job without sacrificing ad-hoc query performance, effectively splitting computing power from machine-learning workloads. Connectivity to Snowflake is self-service, enabling users to gain insights from Spotfire analyses natively within a single environment.
DW: How should enterprise organizations be looking to the future to manage data at scale?
AH: As data becomes the new currency, enterprises need to make sense of data and the demand for guided insight discovery has never been greater.
Enterprises must realize it is a holistic approach of integrating across different platforms to collect the right data, a great team be it a citizen data scientist or a line of business unit manager that understand the value of unlocking the data that will allow a data-driven approach and perform a real digital transformation in your businesses.
Organizations that drive data have had to experience a cultural move, a mindset change, and the buy-in from the internal organization to see business growth.
DW: Can you tell us a little about the Analytics Forum that took place this week in Houston?
AH: TIBCO Analytics Forum is an event that offered a rich attendee experience and a comprehensive agenda to analytics professionals across multiple industries.
The conference addressed industry data challenges in energy, IoT, and analytics, where the attendees experienced first-hand the power of information through analytics by way of customer testimonials, general sessions, training, product demos, a hackathon, and a partner expo, at the Westin Galleria Houston venue.
TIBCO executives Michael O’Connell, chief analytics officer, and Matt Quinn, executive vice president, products and technology and chief operating officer, spoke, and they were joined by industry professionals, Matt Harris, head of IT at Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport; Troy Ruths, PhD, founder, and chief executive officer at Petro.ai; and several executives from Change Healthcare.
It was an information-packed agenda in which attendees could elected to join one of four distinct tracks, including Energy / IoT in Business, Energy / IoT in Technology, Energy / IoT in Use Cases, and Healthcare. Breakout sessions included speakers across several industries, all speaking to how they use analytics to power business decisions. This 3-day event was a great place to learn from experts and industry professionals to keep the attendees updated with today’s trends in the analytics world.
