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Vivek Ranadivé
Real-time computing pioneer is taking his message to the enterprise masses
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TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé, renowned real-time
computing pioneer, boasts an early professional life
straight out of a Hollywood movie script: A
17-year-old prodigy comes to America with $50 in his
pockets. After working his way through engineering
degrees at MIT and Harvard, he eventually electrifies
the financial community with technology that forever
changes the way stocks are traded on Wall Street.
Yet those professional successes, which transpired in
the early to mid-1980s, are mere opening scenes.
Ranadivé has since moved on to sell many of the
nation's largest companies, such as Delta Air Lines,
Intel, and Bechtel, on the real-time computing
concept. Now armed with technology advances and
price reductions, Ranadivé is poised to take real time
to the enterprise masses.
"I started my first company in 1985 by talking my way into Bob Rubin's office
at Goldman Sachs. This is the same Bob Rubin who went on to become
treasury secretary," Ranadivé recalls. "I said to him, 'Why not apply the
technology I have developed to the trading floor?' I was fresh out of
Harvard."
That technology, which indeed would revolutionize financial trading floors,
was Ranadivé's legendary TIB (The Information Bus), a software equivalent of
the omnipresent hardware bus. TIB was an outgrowth of his early notion that
the software industry had it all wrong.
TIB, along with publish and subscribe technology that was also forged in large
part by Ranadivé, would give rise to the real-time movement, which is now
washing over the industry. Real-time computing is built around the goal of
ridding enterprises of bottleneck batch-processing operations. Ranadivé dubs
this phenomenon "event-driven" computing.
Tibco's model has at its heart publish and subscribe technology co-developed
with Cisco. This message-oriented middleware eliminates business process
slowdowns tied to servers constantly having to request data. Instead, IP
multicast networking enables the broadcast of information as it becomes
available.
"We are transforming the supply chain into what I call 'the demand chain.' It's
a move from 'Build it and they will come' to 'Build it when they come,' "
Ranadivé explains.
With his company now boasting $700 million in the bank and 1,500 customers,
Ranadivé says he realizes he is in a much different phase of his career than
when he first mustered the nerve to storm Rubin's office.
"With age, you inevitably learn patience, but hopefully not too much. I'm still
as excited, if not more, than when I walked into Bob Rubin's office. The fire in
my eyes burns as bright." Ranadivé conjures a music analogy he first penned
in his book on real time, The Power of Now, to contrast the challenges
awaiting him with hurdles he has already cleared.
"What I am trying to do now is lead a jazz band. In the past it has been like a
marching band, and in some cases a one-man band," Ranadivé says of the
exhausting years when he struggled to sell Wall Street on real-time concepts.
Currently steering the direction of a matured company bent on selling more
and more enterprises on the merits of real-time, Ranadivé has changed his
methods and outlook.
"My job as CEO now is to orchestrate -- to make music."
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Back to 2002 Technology Innovators
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Profile |
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| Vivek Ranadivé - Tibco's CEO calls the real-time computing phenomenon "event-driven computing." |
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Current position - ounder, chairman, and CEO |
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Age - 42 |
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Technology prediction - "In the market that is just ahead of us, companies
will spend 50 [percent] to 70 percent on integration, not value-added
technology." |
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Related Links |
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Hall of fame 2002 - Several industry icons join InfoWorld's Innovators Hall of Fame |
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Ones to Watch 2002 - These up-and-comers are developing the technologies that will matter most in the coming months |
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Where are they now? - Since the 2000 Ones to Watch were named, many dot-coms imploded and the economy
soured. How have these technological talents fared? |
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