In the past, I was never been very much sold on social media for the enterprise.

Don’t get me wrong. Social media is a big game changer in sharing and disseminating information quickly.

From the Arab Spring, to our recent Singapore General Elections, to the Occupy Wall Street protests — in its fourth week and showing no signs of slowing down, social media is a force to reckon with.

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What if we could predict the future?

TIBCO’s CEO Vivek Ranadivé believes that we can.

Speaking at TUCON 2011, which is the annual customer event that software infrastructure player TIBCO runs every year in Las Vegas, Vivek explained that the key to crystal-ball gazing was access to the right information.

“The right information at the right time is worth more than all the information in the world,” he said during his keynote this week.

He called this the “two-second advantage”, which also happens to be the title of his new book (co-authored with journalist Kevin Maney) that was just published a few weeks ago.

In his book, the two-second advantage refers to the flash of insight that talented people use to guide their decisions.
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Few technology vendors — if they have any ambitions — can ignore the cloud.

Customers demand it and vendors better have an answer.

Case in point software stack infrastructure player TIBCO, who today just announced the formal launch of TIBCO Silver, their suite of cloud-based solutions. The announcement was made at TUCON 2011, their big annual customer event held in Las Vegas.

According to Ivan Casanova, director of product marketing at TIBCO, TIBCO Silver is a “21st century solution” for private, hybrid and public clouds.

One of the offerings is TIBCO Silver Fabric, which allows a cloud administrator to easily manage a private or hybrid cloud deployment.

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Everybody is looking at social media as the next gold rush.

It’s not surprising, given that social media has moved beyond the consumer space and into the enterprise.

At a press event last week, infrastructure software company TIBCO showed off Tibbr 3.0, an social media platform for enterprises that will be available in August 2011.

Tibbr was launched in January this year after being in development since 2009.

It may be a little bit late to the game though, and gaining mindshare will be difficult as the market is quite crowded.

There are a ton of niche companies who specialize in this space like Yammer and Socialcast.

Not to mention all the big IT companies, who all have solutions or are looking at this space, like IBM (with Connections and Lotus Live) and Microsoft (with Office 365 and Officetalk) and Salesforce.com (with Chatter).

So what makes Tibbr different?

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