Recently, when I was organizing the collection, there was a book that brought me many memories, which must have been more than twenty years ago.
Around the beginning of 2000, I met an insider from Silicon Valley at the Hyatt Regency Wangfujing in Beijing, who introduced me to a rising star company in Silicon Valley and tried to convince me to join. This is Tibco Software. (Note: I wanted to give it a Chinese name, but there was no suitable one, and the industry later called it TIBCO Software). This friend from Silicon Valley was Mr. Gene K, then vice president of Tibco Software Inc. in charge of the Asia-Pacific region (note: Mr. Gene K passed away a few years ago, and this article is also a memorial to him). TIBCO Software grew rapidly in the nineties, after being listed on NASDAQ in July 1999, the following year began to expand its international market territory, in the Asia-Pacific region, after Australia, Japan, Singapore, Taipei, TIBCO Software Company established China's first business office in 2000, namely TIBCO Software Beijing Representative Office, and I became the first general manager of TIBCO Software (China) Company.
TIBCO Software, based in Palo Alto, California, was founded in 1997 as a subsidiary of Reuters Holdings from Teknekron Software Systems, founded in 1986 by several Stanford graduates, which was acquired by Reuters Holdings in 1994 for $125.1 million. The CEO and principal founder of TIBCO Software is Vivek Ranadive, an Indian-American.
Vivek Ranadive's entrepreneurial history is legendary. In 1983, Vivek, a young software engineer, and several recent Stanford graduates designed a very simple computer program, the Information Bus. In the early days, no one could predict the application scenario of this computer program, and no company recognized the value of this program, which was later named by TIBCO, named Rendezvous, or Tibco RV. It means dating, partying, collecting.
After Vivitk went public at TIBCO, he wrote his entrepreneurial experience and company philosophy into a book and published it, which is "The Power of Now" that I will talk about today. When I first saw this book, I had the urge to translate it Chinese introduce it to China. Because I really appreciate the ideas in the book, especially Vivek's definition and understanding of real time, and TIBCO Software's contribution to the global market. The Chinese name of the book was the first to be discussed internally, and there are many ways to translate it, such as "The Power of Now" or "The Charm of Real-time", etc., but the meaning that can really summarize the theme of the book is the meaning of real time, and it was finally tentatively named "The Power of Real Time" (Note: The Chinese translation of this book by Tsinghua University is called "The Charm of Real Time"). Real-time and event-driven power, judging from the title alone, the significance of this book is also very profound, and it still has certain inspiration and significance for today's business development. Unfortunately, because the book is too specialized, although the author tries to explain the concepts of event-driven and real-time in the most popular language, the dissemination in China is limited. However, Tibco RV as a generation of information middleware products has been widely used as BEA's Tuxedo and IBM's WebSphere (IBM MQ).
"The Power of Now" became a bestseller in the industry and became a hit. It has received a great response in the IT community in the United States; Many people from Silicon Valley to Seattle are discussing the core ideas in the book—Event Drive and The Information Bus in real time.
The Power of Now has been recommended by several industry heavyweights, including the well-known ones: Scott McNealy (CEO, Sun Microsystems), John Chambers (President and CEO, Cisco Systems), Eric Schmidt (CEO, Novell) and Rick Roscitt President, AT&T)。
The Chinese version of The Power of Now
The Chinese edition (Chinese Simplified edition) of "The Power of Now" was finally translated by three graduate students from the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University under the guidance of their supervisor, Professor Li Mingzhi, and was authorized by the original publisher McGraw Hill to publish the first edition in January 2001, and then printed and published a hardcover edition for the second time in November 2001.
"The Power of Now" introduces many successful cases of using TIB information bus, among which Wall Street Securities Quotation System and TSMC's EAP Dynamic Information Exchange System are the early enterprise classic applications of TIBCO Software Company, and are widely shared and referenced by the industry today.
Case 1 - Real-time data bus of Wall Street stock trading quotation system
In 1985, Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street financial giant, adopted an information transmission mechanism (protocol) to solve the rapidly developing financial information transactions. A new model of information exchange, the publish-subscribe model (PubSub), was born, along with the world's first modern message queuing software, The Information Bus developed by Teknekron.
Due to the fact that the financial trading industry was crowded during that period, TIB spread rapidly. It caught the attention of the financial and telecommunications industries, especially news organizations. These industries also have a particular need to deliver timely information to ever-changing customers. This also explains why Reuters, a major news organization, acquired Teknekron in 1994.
TIBCO is the indirect successor to Teknekron Software Systems. Teknekron was founded in 1983 to develop a software called The Information Bus (TIB), which is used in an important software that deals with stock prices. In 1994, Teknekron was acquired by Reuters, but in 1996 it was spun off into a separate company, named Tibco based on TIB products. In January 1997, TIBCO Software was established as an independent entity to develop and market integrated software for enterprise applications outside the financial services sector. Reuters retained Tibco Finance to develop and market software solutions in the financial services sector. In July 1999, TIBCO Software was listed on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TIBX.
Case 2 - Highway supporting data exchange between TSMC machines
The bridge between semiconductor manufacturing plant execution systems and semiconductor equipment to efficiently and accurately control equipment is particularly important. The equipment automation system is the system most closely related to the equipment in the entire production line of the semiconductor manufacturing plant, which realizes the real-time monitoring of the machines on the production line and is an indispensable control system for factory automation.
Schematic diagram of semiconductor wafer production line architecture
As shown in the figure, in the schematic diagram of the semiconductor wafer production line, the communication between the equipment automation system and other systems in the production line uses the Tibco RV protocol, which is a broadcast communication format. The equipment automation system communicates with the machine through SECS/GEM to realize the control of the machine.
The equipment automation system is the data source of data required by other systems in the production line, and provides the data and information required by the manufacturing execution system, defect detection and classification system (FDC), enterprise resource planning system (ERP), etc., such as product parameters, quality parameters, production line status, material status and machine conditions.
At present, almost all semiconductor chip design and manufacturing plants, packaging and testing plants in the world have adopted the Tibco RV bus to integrate with various manufacturing application systems, and TIBCO's information bus is called the information highway by the semiconductor industry.
postscript
TIBCO Software develops enterprise applications that have helped companies achieve great success in service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM). In the face of the world's rapidly changing market economy, TIBCO has created excellent business recognition and flexibility for the world's top enterprises, which is "The Power of Now" that TIBCO has always advocated.
In November 2005, TIBCO Software partnered with many local companies and integrators to establish the TIBCO CDC Offshore R&D Center in cooperation with many local companies and integrators.
Later, TIBCO Software acquired several high-tech companies to expand and extend its product line, including: Spotfire (2007), DataSynapse (2009), Netrics, and Proginet (2010).
TIBCO Software was taken private in 2014 and delisted from NASDAQ in a $4.3 billion privatization deal with U.S. private equity firm Vista Equity Partners.
In 2013, Vivek teamed up with a consortium from California, including Qualcomm CEO Jacobs, and a Seattle consortium led by Microsoft CEO Ballmer to bid for the NBA Western Division powerhouse, buying the NBA's Sacramento Kings for $535 million.
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