Tibco bucks the trends
- Article 17 of 77
- Information Age, September 2001
Tibco continues to demonstrate the strong sales growth and the technical innovation that will be required to keep a hold on its strong market position.
Tibco has emerged as a powerful force in integration tools in recent years, and seems to be weathering the downturn in the software industry. The company forecasts a jump in revenue of about 82% this year, which would take sales to $458 million, and will be ready to launch a new product - TNT (The New Thing) - in October 2001.
Tibco is best known as the developer of the TIB/Rendezvous publish-and-subscribe messaging system, which enables enterprise applications to communicate with each other across networks or the Internet in real-time.
The company's flagship ActiveEnterprise sits on top of TIB/Rendezvous, and offers a set of brokers that handle integration processes such as transformation, routing, business process management and workflow. Tibco also offers a library of adapters for applications from vendors such as SAP, Siebel, Lotus Notes and Clarify; database adapters for all ODBC-compliant databases; and network adapters to integrate other messaging buses such as IBM's MQSeries or object brokers like COM and CORBA. Tibco also offers a software development kit to build adapters to bespoke applications.
Fred Meyer, chief product strategist at Tibco, says that one of the company's aims for 2001, in response to customer demand, is to make its products easier to deploy and manage. For this reason, he adds, Tibco will also embrace Microsoft's .NET platform: “An important problem is that not everything is written in Java yet. The reality of the world is that you have to be a reasonably good programmer to use Java,” he says.
TNT builds on this idea of ease of use, integrating a selection of Tibco's wide-ranging capabilities into a single box. The product's intended target is those companies that do not need all the capabilities or have the development resources to deploy and maintain the ActiveEnterprise product set.
Now, Tibco hopes that TNT and other forthcoming products will allow the company's ascendancy to continue.