TIBCO Software Inc. is a global software company, with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. In their key market investment banking, their name, commonly shorted to TIB is synonomous with their
(EMB) enterprise message bus software Tibco Rendezvous. Rendezvous has the dominant market share in price distribution applications with a strong reputation
for scalability and fast asynchronous message delivery. Their main competitor is IBM WebSphere MQ, however MQ is relied upon
less for price distribution and more for trade capture.
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 current range of products also includes
a Portal, Workflow and Business Intelligence Solutions.
Tibco Rendezvous is perhaps their most important and well known product. It is an underlying network
transport layer, providing a messaging platform used by their other (more high level) software. This Message Oriented Middleware was Tibco's original product, bringing them a lot of early success in the pre-internet
IT industry. Partly owing to this long track record, the Rendezvous platform is still very popular within the finance industry and has a large
installation base.
Vivek Ranadive founded the company as Teknekron Software Systems in 1987. This company 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.
In 1994,
the 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 1997,
a small fraction of TIBCO was spun off as TIBCO Software Inc., with Tibco Rendezvous as its main product.
TIBCO
acquisitions include, among others:
- InCommon
- InConcert
- Extensibility
- Praja
- Talarian
- Staffware
- General Interface
- ObjectStar
TIBCO
participates in the development of industry standards in many areas:
- Business Process (including BPEL, UAN)
- Web Services
- Integration (including JBI)
- Java, J2EE
- Management
- Messaging (including PGM, which was originally co-developed with Cisco, and JMS)
- Portlets
