Everyone thinks their own baby is the most perfect, handsome being ever to have come into the world, but the truth is that newborns often look rather squashed-up and, not to put too fine a point on it, a little bit ugly. Most of us just don’t have the courage to tell the parents.
Anthony Abbattista, though, is not one to shrink from telling it like it is. The VP of technology solutions at Allstate, North America’s largest publicly held personal insurance company, used this analogy recently when describing his firm’s collaboration with Tibco Software on the integration of its ActiveMatrix product with Microsoft’s .NET environment.
“We’d been having listen-to-each-other days and that had led to Tibco’s collaboration with Microsoft,“ he said. “When they showed us what they’d got, their first question was: ‘Isn’t our baby beautiful?’, and we said: ‘Actually no, it’s wrinkly and quite ugly’.”
Abbattista was using the point to illustrate why his company had been working with Tibco for the past four years, when the vendor didn’t have a track record yet in the insurance sector. In short, he likes the firm’s willingness to change. “Tibco has the eagerness of a start-up and the follow-through of a partner,” he told the vendor’s user conference in San Francisco in May this year. “They’re long on vision; they’ll listen, collaborate and make changes.”
For an IT shop like Allstate which is 50 per cent Java and 50 per cent .NET, that was important, as Tibco technology was forming the basis of Allstate’s enterprise service bus. Of course, as one of the largest IT users in the US with nearly 40,000 employees, Allstate can perhaps expect partners to design their products with it in mind.
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