Tibco Software

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TIBCO Software Inc.
Type Public (NASDAQ: TIBX)
Founded 1985
Headquarters Palo Alto, CA
Key people Vivek Ranadive, founder, CEO, chairman
Industry Computer Software
Products Business software
Revenue US $577.39 million (2007)
Employees 1900 (April, 2008)
Website www.tibco.com

TIBCO Software Inc. is a software company, with headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

TIBCO provides business process management and business integration software. This software integrates, manages, and monitors enterprise applications and enables reliable and high-performance information delivery. Their software products include applications for coordinating business process and activities, securely exchanging information with trading partners, creating and maintaining XML documents, and managing distributed systems.

The company's major competitors are webMethods, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, 29West, and Sonic Software.

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[edit] Products

The current range of products includes a Portal, Workflow, Business Intelligence Solutions, enterprise messaging backbone, B2B integration and other software. The company's best known products include TIBCO BusinessWorks (EAI), TIBCO Rendezvous and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (messaging), and TIBCO iProcess Suite (BPM).

TIBCO Rendezvous is perhaps the most important and well known product. It is an underlying messaging layer that provides publish-subscribe and request-reply semantics. This Message Oriented Middleware was TIBCO's original product, bringing the company a lot of early success in the pre-WWW IT industry. Partly owing to this long track record, the TIBCO Rendezvous platform is still very popular within the finance industry and has a large installation base. The company was a key contributor to the Java Message Service specification and supports the standard in the TIBCO Enterprise Message Service product.

The company's second best-known product is TIBCO BusinessWorks, which is a leading player in the EAI space. TIBCO BusinessWorks is a business integration and web services tool kit supporting the development, deployment and management of project-oriented business solutions. TIBCO BusinessWorks is based on the same core technology as TIBCO’s ActiveEnterprise product suite.

The company also played a role in the growth of the enterprise portal space. In the early 1990s, it invented a real-time, user-personalized, thick-client portal product called MarketSheet, which was used pervasively in securities trading rooms in the financial industry. When the web revolution arrived, this product provided a vision that was subsequently implemented in the web world as user-configurable portals such as My Yahoo!(TM). The company thinned down the front end for its own portal products to applets and finally to DHTML.

TIBCO General Interface [1] is an Ajax toolkit for building and deploying Rich Internet Applications (RIA), components and portlets that look similar to desktop software.

[edit] History

JoMei Chang founded the company as Teknekron Software Systems in 1985 as a subsidiary of technology incubator Teknekron Corporation. Dale Skeen invented the patented Subject Based Addressing technology and built the Teknekron Information Bus and a Market Data Delivery System solution that also included products like MarketSheet (a kind of thick-client portal). This technology was revolutionary, and played a major role in the drive to replace "green screens" and digitize securities trading floors world-wide. In addition to Subject Based Addressing, TIB included many other common messaging concepts that have since become widely accepted, and as hardware and operating systems evolved, the TIB evolved from using broadcast messaging to using IP multicast groups.

The company subsequently diversified, delivering software solutions first to energy and high-tech manufacturing customers, and then to customers in other sectors.

In 1994, Teknekron Software Systems was acquired by Reuters. In 1996, the company was renamed TIBCO (The Information Bus Company). The Teknekron Information Bus was renamed, tongue in cheek, "The Information Bus," although it continues to be abbreviated as, "the TIB"

In 1996, the company was renamed TIBCO (The Information Bus Company) after its foundational product, The Information Bus (TIB).

In January 1997 TIBCO Software Inc. was established as a separate entity to create and market software solutions for use in the integration of business information, processes and applications outside the financial services sector. Reuters retained TIBCO Finance to create and market software solutions for the financial services sector.

Many other products have been added since that time, both through internal development and through acquisition. TIBCO acquisitions include, among others:

  • InCommon (content push technology)
  • InConcert (workflow products)
  • Extensibility (XML technology)
  • Praja (Business Activity Management products)
  • Talarian (a messaging vendor)
  • Staffware (business process management products)
  • General Interface (Ajax technology)
  • ObjectStar (Integration development environment for Mainframe)
  • Spotfire (Enterprise Analytics)

In July 1999 TIBCO went public on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol TIBX.


TIBCO participates in the development of industry standards in many areas:

  • Business Process (including BPEL, UAN), BAM too
  • Web Services
  • B2B (including RosettaNet, ebXML).
  • Integration (including JBI, SCA)
  • Java, Java 2 EE
  • Management
  • Messaging (including PGM, a standard that TIBCO initially co-developed with Cisco, and also JMS)
  • Portlets (including JSR 168, JSR 286, WSRP)
  • Ajax (programming) via the OpenAjax Alliance

In 2005, Vivek Randive won the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for his innovative use of information technology.

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