Why TIBCO MFT may be costing you more than you think

If you are in the process of purchasing TIBCO MFT, or if you are an existing customer who is close to your renewal date – you are probably looking at the quote and wondering how you can reduce the cost.

Well, the short and direct answer to this question is that you need to consider an alternative MFT solution.

That’s because the value quoted at the point of purchase should be only one consideration point of many when attempting to understand the true total cost of ownership (TCO) over a five-to-ten-year period.

Of course, TCO calculations are subjective to your business, however here are a few items we suggest you consider:

Why TIBCO MFT requires more expensive in-house resources

TIBCO MFT, made up of the original Proginet Cyberfusion Integration Suite (CFI) components Control Center, Internet Server, and Platform Server are on-premises solutions. TIBCO’s Integration Cloud is an iPaaS solution which covers some MFT capabilities, but it is not the same solution.

In fact, there is no cloud MFT or managed service available at all. And with dwindling available MFT skills in the jobs market, the cost to maintain an in-house team is at an all-time high.

At Axway, not only are our MFT solutions available in the cloud – with support for containerization – but the Axway Managed Cloud means customers can outsource their hosting and management to a more capable team, without the overhead.

💰According to Indeed, the average salary for a Managed File Transfer engineer in the US falls within a range of $88,500 and $162,800 per year, with some offering compensation of up to $200,000.

The hidden cost of TIBCO MFT support tickets

Purchasing software or maintaining a subscription for a service will typically include some level of technical support, which can be called upon when needed. This is either included in the price or added as an extra. Businesses with a more astute handle on their cost structures will also want to understand the impact of ticket handling on their own resources.

At a basic level, support tickets run through several common stages:

1. An issue is identified.
2. The issue is raised with the vendor via a support service.
3. The vendor will perform a diagnosis, which may require some back and forth to establish the conditions of the issue, and sending of evidence such as logs or maybe remote assistance sessions to get a live view.
4. If the issue is known or a fix is immediately identified, this is either communicated to the customer and the responsibility is left with them to implement, or it may be implemented by the vendor via another remote assistance session. If unknown, the issue may be passed to a vendor engineering team, who will in time release a patch or provide further assistance.
5. The issue is resolved, and the system is returned to operational health.

Throughout these steps, customer resources are drawn upon to either support the vendor through evidence-gathering or by implementing fixes. Meanwhile, with the MFT system performing sub-optimally, there may be an impact on its effectiveness.

Therefore, to gain an accurate view of the cost of supporting an MFT solution, we must consider the relative number of tickets which are likely to be raised and the typical length of time to resolve.

Of course, without inside knowledge of TIBCO’s support statistics, it is impossible to say for sure how to answer these questions. However, here are some thought-inducing considerations:

• TIBCO has a vast portfolio of data-driven solutions and around 2500 employees globally. How many of those work on MFT is difficult to know, but customers would be wise to consider the level of MFT-specific expertise available, and across how many potential customers that is spread. Are ticket resolution times lengthier as a result, creating a higher cost per ticket?
• There have been very few releases of TIBCO MFT since its acquisition of Proginet, with only four releases of Platform Server in the past 10 years. If they are not keeping up with changes in environment and dependencies organically, are more tickets being raised as a result?
• On the same topic of release regularity, can we assume that some customers are forced to wait unusually long wait-times for releases which resolve some of the support tickets? And forcing them to operate sub-optimally until such time?

💰In some instances, complex or supervised tickets can cost between $89.90 and $148.80, with extreme cases reaching $280 to $500 per ticket.

Why TIBCO MFT may be costing you innovation

A blind spot for most customers is understanding where their current solution has capability shortcomings and what the opportunity cost is of not being able to take advantage of them.

Take for example the ability to send events from an MFT solution to Apache Kafka. A business which has an MFT solution and uses Apache Kafka can benefit from an integrated ecosystem: two systems working to bring greater efficiency to the business.

Alternatively, consider the business which also uses Kafka but doesn’t have an MFT solution with native integration capabilities. They may script an integration, have a human-led process in-between, or abandon connecting the two together all together.

The difference between the two is that the latter business incurs either higher human costs or misses out on the monetary benefits of integrating the two.

Interestingly, much like the famous analogy of the frog in the slowly boiling water who is unable to notice the slight change, many businesses who have been using an MFT solution for a considerable amount of time may not realize the shortcomings of their choice in modern times.

Looking at the release notes for Platform and Internet Server solutions, there has been a much slower cadence of releases compared to its peers. Version 8 of Platform Server was released in 2018 and has only seen two further updates since.

Not fixing things which are not broken is a great soundbite, but for businesses who are always in pursuit of the productivity frontier (and even those who aren’t, but should be), such blind spots could put them behind their competitors.

💰 Calculating opportunity cost between two different MFT solutions is difficult and subjective.

However, consider the following formula, using estimated values:

• Return on TIBCO MFT solution: The cost of X subscription per year deducted from a return on investment of Y based on capabilities A and B.
• Return on an alternative MFT solution: The cost of X subscription per year deducted from a return on investment of Y based on greater capabilities of A, B, C, and D.

Opportunity cost = return on alternative MFT solution – return on TIBCO MFT solution.

Unless there is significant discrepancy between the subscription prices, it is the loss of capabilities which ultimately defines the opportunity cost.

Lack of monitoring in TIBCO MFT could be costing you thousands

This topic is likely to be one with which you do have some familiarity; in fact, there are entire solutions that cater to the visibility and observability of key business systems. TIBCO MFT has little in the way of monitoring capabilities inside of the Platform and Internet Server solutions, and instead offloads this to their Command Center.

Command Center is the third offering in the TIBCO MFT portfolio, which provides a single interface for event alerting, reporting on the outcome of transfer activities and allowing control of Platform and Internet Servers by way of collecting logs from each server.

What is missing, however is visibility of overall system health.

Through experience working in managed file transfer for many years, we know MFT solutions are initially deployed strategically, for the purpose of supporting one of a handful of outcomes.

However, over time they become of critical importance, often supporting some of the most important business functions. It is at this point that businesses must take a step back from monitoring the outcome of transfers, and instead observing the health of the application and dependencies.

The cost for failing to do so could be:

• Sub-optimal systems not having the throughput they could, and that are therefore unable to support the business adequately.
• Sub-optimal systems giving trading partners who interact with the MFT system a negative impression of working with the business.
• Sub-optimal systems leading the business to stand up additional resources, virtual machines or containers – at a cost – to increase throughput and capacity unnecessarily.
• The business being unable to spot slow degradation in service, leading to an avoidable outage.
• The business being unable to pinpoint the cause of degradation or an outage and having to throw resources at resolving the issue in an ineffective manner.
• The business losing faith in the solution and diverting their reliance to another tool, which might be less of a fit than MFT to support the business.

💰An IDC and Carbonite survey from 2023 reports that the average cost to a business for an outage of B2B IT software is between $137 and $427. Don’t forget to factor in the cost of raising a support ticket with the vendor, in cases where external support is required.

Getting TIBCO MFT for a lower cost

As humans, it is very tempting for us to want to reduce any comparison to a binary choice. Looking at two values on two competing quotes is a very attractive way to come to a decision without the hindsight of what is to come.

However, this only scratches the surface. As has been shown above, sometimes the cheapest – that which has been bundled in with something else; or that which can be purchased easily through an existing channel – may not be the best choice in the long term.

So how can we purchase TIBCO MFT at a lower cost?

We don’t. We buy something which has a much smaller TCO, something we can rely on, and something which works for us in the longer term.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Axway MFT a replacement for TIBCO MFT?

Yes, both are managed file transfer solutions which are typically used by upper mid-tier and enterprise businesses. Both solutions have comparable basic features, however Axway MFT excels in areas such as usability, security, and scalability. One notable difference between the solutions is that all elements of administration and self-service in Axway is via a web interface – which speaks volumes about its modernity.

Has TIBCO MFT entered end of life?

You would be forgiven for thinking so, but TIBCO haven’t indicated this. There are considerable gaps between releases and very little new features or capabilities added to the solutions over the past eight years. TIBCO has a vast portfolio, and customers would be right to question its commitment to the file transfer industry.

Is TIBCO support getting worse?

We don’t have any statistics to say that it is, however, we do know from customers who have moved that their experience has not been a positive one. Part or all of the TIBCO MFT support team have now been outsourced to a third party, and there may have been some disruption and speed to competency challenges as a result.

Does TIBCO MFT have a cloud edition?

Not currently. TIBCO has a cloud integration suite which is more aligned to an iPaaS solution, however there is no Platform or Internet Server in the cloud. Some customers have installed TIBCO MFT into hyperscaler VMs to achieve a similar outcome, however it is unclear from TIBCO documentation whether this is supported.