Tibco: Aggressive Front-Runner

Tibco Software hasn’t gotten to where it is—at the top of the heap of vendors of enterprise application integration software (EAI)—by standing pat.

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The acquisition of Talarian, a messaging company Tibco is buying for $115 million, underscores Tibco’s conviction that networked communications will replace the database as the locus of interactions between diverse applications. Indeed, even before the Talarian acquisition, Tibco was continuing to invest large sums in messaging and had doubled the price of the messaging products in its portfolio.

The strength of Tibco’s messaging line was evident to TNT Logistics North America, a Tibco customer that was using proprietary messaging software until a year ago. Now TNT, a

seller of supply chain management systems, is using Tibco for a wide range of functions, including process automation, says enterprise architect Terry Nutt.

The breadth of Tibco’s product line also appealed to executives at CapitalStream, a Seattle company that offers a credit-analysis service. “We sampled a good number of middleware vendors,” says CapitalStream COO Jeff Dirks. “Tibco had best-of-breed capabilities, backed up by an architecture that we thought was superior to the competition.”

Tibco’s founder, a brash engineer named Vivek Ranadivé who spent part of his career at Ford Motor, sees his main competition coming from IBM—and dismisses smaller competitors like WebMethods and Vitria as being among “the seven dwarfs.” He’s counting on continuing to differentiate Tibco from IBM by bringing BusinessWorks to small companies, not EAI’s biggest beneficiaries to date.

Tibco Software, 3165 Porter Drive, Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 846-1000 www.tibco.com/solutions

Ticker: TIBX
Exchange: NASDAQ
Employees: 1,100

Vivek Ranadivé
Chairman, CEO
Ranadivé is Tibco’s founder. Previously, he was a manager and engineer at Ford Motor and held senior management positions at Fortune Systems and M/A-COM Linkabit. Ranadivé holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering from the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard University.

Fred Meyer
Chief Marketing Officer

Murray Rode
Chief Corporate Development Officer

Shankar Iyer
VP, Products

Products
Software that enables application-to-application communications and business-process automation (Tibco Active-Enterprise); aggregation of content and services and information retrieval using the Web and wireless devices (Tibco Active Portal); automation of business processes with partners (Tibco Active Exchange); and tools to manage shared-document formats (Tibco Extensibility).

Competitors
IBM, New Era of Networks, Mercator, SeeBeyond, Iona, Vitria, WebMethods

Reference Checks

NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
Ulrich J. Seif
CIO/SVP
(408) 721-5000
Project: Host SAP HR and financials for chipmaker

EXPANETS
Joe Bologna
Director of IT infrastructure and services
(303) 300-6300
Project: Host and manage Oracle ERP, Siebel CRM for this provider of networked communications services to small- and medium-sized businesses

REDBACK NETWORKS
Lars Rabbe
CIO
(408) 571-5000
Project: Host and manage Oracle ERP. This is the core enterprise software of this $300 million (sales) networking systems company

HMSHOST
(formerly Host Marriott Services)
Martyn Holland
CIO
E-mail: [email protected]
Project: Host and manage PeopleSoft HR and payroll services. Added a new process-scheduling tool to original contract earlier this year at largest food, beverage and retail service for travel industry

DAIMLER CHRYSLER CAPITAL SERVICES
Clarence Bastarache
CIO
(203) 750-7100
Project: Host and manage SAP ERP system, SAP Business Ware-housing for the financing unit of the global automaker

ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Jim Fisher
Assistant VP for finance and administration
(716) 475-6020
Project: Host and manage Oracle ERP including finan- cial and human resources systems

MITSUBISHI SILICON AMERICA
David Whitton
IT director
(503) 315-6058
Project: Host and manage SAP ERP software from QCS

TNT LOGISTICS NORTH AMERICA
Terry Tutt
Enterprise Architect
(888) 564-4789
Project: Starting in fall 2000, TNT Logistics switched out the proprietary messaging infrastructure driving its supply chain management product for Tibco software.

DELTA AIRLINES
Dean Compton
Director of Middleware Service
Mike Childress
VP of Common Services
(404) 714-1500
Project: Starting in 1999, Delta swapped out proprietary middleware for Tibco messaging as part of its comprehensive effort to tie together flight and airport information for Delta staffers and business partners at 74 airports.

CAPITALSTREAM
Jeff Dirks
Executive VP and COO
(206) 545-9522
Project: CapitalStream is using Tibco middleware to power credit-analysis tasks for its banking clients.

FORBES.COM
Michael Smith
Chief Technology Officer
(212) 366-8898
Project: Uses Tibco to deliver stock market quotes from Reuters, a Tibco distributor, to the magazine’s Web site.

CORAL ENERGY
Tom Mark
CIO
Danny Meyer
VP of Development
(713) 767-5400
Project: Energy marketing and trading company employs Tibco publish-and-subscribe technology to tie together its trading systems, sending real-time transaction data throughout the enterprise as well as passing it to external exchanges.

U.S. NAVY
Christian Davis
Head of METOC IS Department
(757) 444-2436
Project: Starting in November 1999, Naval Atlantic Meteorology and Oceanography Center (METOC) adopted Tibco technology to move weather alert data among more than 50 global sites.