TIBCO and Cisco Systems, Inc. Share Development of Open Specification for Publish and Subscribe Technology
PALO ALTO, Calif. (December 10, 1996) - TIBCO Inc., an international leader and pioneer in communications middleware, and more than a dozen Internet industry leaders today endorsed a proposed new industry standard for the "push" model of information distribution over the Internet. The proposed standard, called publish and subscribe, will significantly reduce Internet traffic and make it easier to find and receive information on-line. The companies, which include Cisco Systems, Inc., CyberCash, Informix, Infoseek, JavaSoft, Sun Microsystems, Verisign, NETCOM, and others in addition to TIBCO, announced plans, products and support for publish and subscribe.
TIBCO and Cisco Systems are developing an open reference specification for publish and subscribe technology.
"Publish and subscribe is the only model you can use to allow your company to continue to evolve without having to do major 'throw the switch transitions' to your applications, to your databases and your entire computer architecture," said Scott McNealy, chairman, president and CEO of Sun Microsystems. "We are looking forward to making the Java programming language an integral part of the publish and subscribe environment," he said.
"TIBCO and its partners are bringing Wall Street to Main Street by contributing technology to the Internet that has been proven in the world's demanding financial markets over the last decade," said Edward Acly, director of Middleware Research of International Data Corporation (IDC), a leading information technology market research and consulting firm. "Bringing TIBCO's reliable implementation of this new publish and subscribe model to the Internet, promises to open up many new business automation possibilities for the Internet's worldwide community."
Top Internet Plumbing Problem Attacked
Today's information flow on the Internet is relatively inefficient because it uses a communications model known as request/reply. In the request/reply model, an application must explicitly ask a specific site for information. Continuous updates require many repeated requests to determine if content has changed. Each request must receive a separate and distinct response, which creates unnecessary duplication and wastes compute cycles on the server. As more and more users make requests, the result is significant delays.The publish and subscribe model significantly eases the traffic problem. Publish and subscribe allows information to be distributed as it becomes available. Subscribers receive the content in which they've registered an interest, without specifically connecting to a site or an application. When an application using request/reply for information dissemination is upgraded to publish and subscribe, network traffic is reduced by 50% or more.
Publish and subscribe was pioneered by TIBCO (formerly Teknekron Software Systems) and is widely used in banks and brokerage firms around the world. Traders receive financial information, automatically, and in real-time, from computers that "push" new information, such as stock price changes, to them. In TIBCO's implementation, a single message, issued just once by a server or publisher, makes its way through the "plumbing" of the network to thousands of users, rather than having the server send thousands of messages to thousands of users.
"We are embedding publish and subscribe into our clients, our cash registers, and our banking software," said Bill Melton, chairman and CEO of CyberCash, a provider of electronic payment instruments for the Internet. "Publish and subscribe will allow us to scale, to be robust, and to be easily adaptive to new applications and new protocols as they come down the road."
TIBnet -- The New Plumbing for the Internet
Upgrading the "plumbing" of the Internet is a major undertaking that requires complementary products from many companies in order to be successful. In addition to its development of an open specification, TIBCO separately announced today the TIBnet family of products for implementing publish and subscribe in computer hardware and software. The products include tools for developers to build publish and subscribe applications, for firewall administrators to deploy publish and subscribe solutions inside their corporate infrastructure, and for Internet service providers to deploy large publish and subscribe networks.Other Internet industry leaders announced plans to develop a wide range of products or services that are built with publish and subscribe or incorporate TIBnet products. For example:
Cisco Systems is developing network layer publish and subscribe features for Cisco IOS software to provide improved scalability over large enterprise and Internet Service Provider networks. CISCO infrastructure devices currently make up over 80% of the backbone transporting global Internet traffic. Deployment of publish and subscribe services over the Internet will allow scalable delivery of information content.
Applications will be able to depend on having publish and subscribe facilities across the Internet. Internet Service Providers including Exodus, ICon and NETCOM, are enabling publish and subscribe within their networks so customers can count on scalable information delivery.
Informix will incorporate TIBnet technology into INFORMIX-Universal Web Architecture and INFORMIX-Universal Server. This will allow businesses to build and manage Intelligent Web sites -- a new breed of Multimedia-rich Web applications created to deliver customized content that present a corporation's Internet, intranet and extranet users with a tailored view of information when the application is accessed. Users will also be able to receive dynamic content directly from INFORMIX-Universal Server through an Event DataBlade( module co-developed by TIBCO and Informix.
"Informix is using TIBCO's publish and subscribe technology to deliver a truly interactive, database-driven Web environment," said Brett Bachman, general manger of Enterprise Products at Informix. "As part of our Universal Web Architecture, TIBCO's technology helps enable us to deliver on the promise of the Web by allowing the creation of intelligent, interactive Web applications. We are also excited to be the first to deliver an Event DataBlade module for Informix's Universal Server that provides publish and subscribe capabilities for Universal Server applications."
"JavaSoft will work with TIBCO and other partners to define a Java Message Services Specification," said Alan Baratz, president of JavaSoft. "TIBCO's experience will help us expand Java's presence in all levels of the enterprise, from the desktop to the servers. Scalable messaging as envisioned by TIBnet should be an important part of the Java Enterprise Platform."
TIBCO Products
TIBCO develops and markets a full range of tools and applications based on its TIB TM(The Information BusTM) technology. A highly sophisticated program-to-program interface and communications platform, TIB technology enables applications to publish information, such as stock prices or competitive data, to other applications which express an interest in the information. Utilizing TIBCO's Subject-Based Addressing TM, TIB technology directs messages to their destinations over local networks or the Internet, so that application processes can communicate without details of network addresses or connections.TIBCO's products use TIB technology to provide organizations with a proven middleware infrastructure for handling complex, distributed messaging efficiently and reliably. TIBCO's core middleware products include Enterprise Toolkit*, a suite of enterprise-class, object-oriented middleware tools for building and modeling flexible, integrated communications-enabled distributed applications, and Rendezvous, an API toolkit that allows C, C++ and Java programmers to quickly develop and deploy distributed applications with robust messaging capabilities.
About TIBCO
Founded in 1985, TIBCO Inc. is an international market leader and pioneer in network software tools for building client/server applications that provide real-time information exchange throughout the enterprise. The company developed and patented publish and subscribe technologies that allow for interapplication communications across heterogeneous environments.Based in Palo Alto, California, TIBCO operates as an independent division of Reuters Holdings PLC, one of the world's largest news and information companies. With more than 400 customers worldwide, TIBCO sells distributed systems to the commercial marketplace including manufacturing and telecommunications businesses, and is a premier supplier of digital trading systems and integration technologies to financial services firms worldwide.
For more information contact TIBCO at 415-846-5000, or on the World Wide Web at www.tibco.com.
Note to editors: A digital press kit containing TIBnet product details and technical information, statements from TIBnet partners and photography is available at http://www.p2pr.com and http://www.tibco.com.
TIBnet, Rendezvous, Enterprise Toolkit and Subject-Based Addressing are trademarks of TIBCO Inc. Information Bus and TIB are registered trademarks of TIBCO Inc. Other brand or product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
REUTERS and the dotted logo and sphere logos are the house trademarks of REUTERS Limited. REUTERS is a registered trademark in more than 25 countries worldwide.
Copyright ) 1996 Cisco Systems Inc. All rights reserved.
