Weekend reading on TIBX (from CBS MarketWatch in Jan):
Thom Calandra's StockWatch
Tibco Software founder: 'Speed is God'
CEO sees software as great connector
By Thom Calandra, CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 2:55 PM ET Jan 28, 2000 FTMarketWatch.com
Thom's biography
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Vivek Ranadive is the Silicon Valley billionaire whose name is NOT on the lips of most investors. His mantra: "Speed is God; time is the devil."
Tibco Software (TIBX: news, msgs) was one of 1999's top IPOs. Ranadive, the California company's founder, owns 6.5 percent of the outstanding shares.
Tibco's name comes from a patented technology called "The Information Bus," one of the early digitizers of financial data on Wall Street.
Big investors in Ranadive'sTibco, whose products help corporate and public networks communicate with one another, include Reuters Plc (RTRSY: news, msgs) from London and Yahoo (YHOO: news, msgs) and Cisco Systems (CSCO: news, msgs) from Silicon Valley.
"All of these view Tibco as a strategic partner," Ranadive, the company's CEO and founder, told me in an interview that will appear this weekend on "CBS MarketWatch Weekend," our television. show. See the TV segment.
"Cisco is embedding our software in all of their products," Ranadive says. "They're making it part of their IOS, their Internet working operating system. Reuters is using this technology for everything they do. It is the basis of their content management, all of their content distribution. Yahoo clearly is a very strong partner."
Executives close to Tibco tell me the company might expand its business relationship with Cisco, the leading maker of computer networking equipment. Ranadive wouldn't comment directly on that possibility.
One of Tibco's new products is a Web portal builder. Tibco says German software maker SAP Ag (SAP: news, msgs) used the PortalBuilder to construct mySAP.com, the world's largest commercial Web site. Indeed, the company claims that manufacturing processes for 70 percent of the world's computer chips are somehow connected to Tibco software applications.
Tibco is one of many so-called Internet infrastructure companies that connect one business customer to another. As fast as they can. The 3-year-old company hails from a much older company that Ranadive started years ago; the unit, now called TFTI, sells financial data technology through Reuters. Tibco in its present form first sold shares to the public in the summer of 1999.
Companies such as Tibco, Viador (VIAD: news, msgs), Autonomy in Britain, red-hot Vitria Technology (VITR: news, msgs) -- ING Barings just started coverage of Vitria at a "strong buy" -- and Iona (IONA: news, msgs) are like middlemen, their Web sites and technologies standing between a company's hardware and its business partners.
Wiring the world: Speed is God
The ultimate goal, says Ranadive, whose Tibco is the largest of the lot, is to create a "zero-lag" environment. That's where everything -- data, phone numbers, order forms -- is instantly available to customers. "In the infrastructure space, there's a whole stack of software you need if you're selling goods and services online," he says. "We've greased the whole value chain. Our technology, for instance, slides right into an Oracle database. It's being embedded right into Cisco's routers and hubs."
In that way, Tibco hopes to "wire" Fortune 1000 companies, says Ranadive, who has electrical engineering degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"If you believe the network is the computer ... you believe in Tibco."
Vivek Ranadive, CEO and founder, Tibco Software
Ranadive, at the age of 42, has a gift. He can explain this stuff to ordinary folks. Ranadive authored "The Power of Now: How Winning Technologies Sense and Respond to Change Using Real-Time Technology." That's where his "Speed is God" quote comes from. "Change, he says, "is the sole constant in the Information Age."
Ranadive's book, published by McGraw-Hill, is worth reading if you believe that several technology companies, among them Cisco and Yahoo, increasingly will influence the flow of data, articles, video and other content around the globe.
"If you believe the network is the computer," Ranadive, sporting a new goatee, told me, "then you believe in Cisco. And you believe in Tibco."
Now that Tibco has a Nasdaq stock-market value of $10 billion, Ranadive's ability to translate the language of business-to-business commerce to investors is becoming just as important as his company's products. Tibco, expressing confidence in its future, this week declared it would split its stock three shares for each share that investors hold.
Is Ranadive, whose Tibco stake makes him a billionaire on paper, concerned that the companies that hold the bulk of Tibco stock -- Reuters, Cisco and Yahoo -- will consider paring their positions? Especially with Tibco stock near an all-time high on Nasdaq?
"They're all working on embedding our products into their products," he says about the companies that own a majority of Tibco's outstanding shares. "Most of Yahoo's eyeballs are corporate eyeballs. It needs to get some of that corporate content, like SAP is doing, to blend with their generic Yahoo content. They all see us as a strategic investment."
|
