Tibco lands loyalty management start-up for $23m

Tibco Software has moved into the business applications space for the first time by acquiring a San-Francisco-based start-up selling software-as-a-service-based loyalty management offerings for $23 million in cash.

The middleware vendor intends to integrate Loyalty Lab's service with its infrastructure and complex event processing software to enable retail, telco and banking customers to access loyalty information in real-time, analyse patterns of consumer behaviour and identify which products to promote at which time.

Ram Menon, the firm’s executive vice president for worldwide marketing, said: "What businesses require today is a 21st century solution for building customer loyalty – one that supports not only customer transactions but also real-time customer interactions or events, and a platform that scales to billions of such events across an increasingly social and mobile marketplace."

Loyalty Lab's SaaS offering enables marketers at its 35 retail, hospitality and consumer product manufacturer customers to design and manage loyalty programmes such as frequent flier miles without needing to customise the software themselves.

Its management team, which includes founder and chairman Mark Goldstein and chief executive Matt Howland, will all join Tibco to continue running the business.