VideoSquabbling about who was the first to come up with "the next big thing" is a favourite game in Silicon Valley, and it is being played with gusto over the real-time enterprise. Vivek Ranadivé, the chief executive of Tibco, a Silicon Valley software firm, is miffed that Mr Khosla at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture-capital firm, has appropriated his thoughts about the subject. He grumbles that the money man must have picked up the idea when Mr Khosla presented him with a leadership award a year ago.
In technology, especially, good ideas tend to pop up in several places when the time is right. But Mr Ranadivé was definitely one of the first to realise that there will be a growing need for integration: linking together disparate computer systems so information can flow more or less instantaneously. He also saw that this has to be done in a way that allows companies to change their business processes quickly.
To become real-time, companies must have an overarching "spreadsheet" that connects everything they do. But they also need good tools so they can easily change "macros". And because users cannot keep track of all those rows and columns, they need an intuitive overview of the information they really care about.
Indian-born Mr Ranadivé was one of the first to think about this because he had seen the opposite in action—on a trading floor at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, in the mid-1980s. The room looked like the warehouse of a disorganised computer store, Mr Ranadivé writes in his book "The Power of Now" (McGraw-Hill, 1999). In a business where every second counts, each desk was packed with as many as 18 separate monitors and several keyboards so that the trader could draw information from a range of 25 different, technologically incompatible news sources. He then had to aggregate all the information himself, often using nothing more high-tech than a pen and paper.
Let's Take the Bus
The obvious answer to this IT chaos—to build one huge, integrated system—was impracticable, because it would have been impossible to get all those involved to agree to a common set of standards. Building a system for each trader would have been too costly and complex. Mr Ranadivé's solution was what he calls "the information bus"—a way of reducing the data formats of the different news sources to a common denominator so that they could be displayed together.
This universal data conduit made it possible for traders to get exactly the information they wanted. The software does not send news items or stock quotes to individual traders, but "publishes" them to electronic addresses representing a subject, for example news.microsoft.nasdaq or equities.ibm.nyse. Traders can subscribe to these feeds and be updated automatically.
This way of distributing information, called "publish and subscribe", became the basis for many digital trading systems on Wall Street. Today, the trading floor at Goldman Sachs looks very different. Only two monitors sit on a trader's desk—one for the firm's internal and PC applications and one for MarketSheet, a service that brings together all the information a trader needs on one screen: stock quotes, news feeds, earnings information, graphs.
Mr Ranadivé's first start-up, Teknekron Software Systems, sold such messaging software to the financial-services sector. In 1997, he founded Tibco (The Information Bus Company), because he was sure that firms other than those on Wall Street would soon need similar technology. For one thing, capital markets, where most transactions are time-sensitive, have traditionally adopted new technology before the rest of the economy does. But the need to tie together disparate computer systems is even more noticeable outside the financial world. Companies have accumulated layers and layers of IT systems, many of which are unable to talk to each other.
Take databases. It is not at all unusual, even in high-tech firms, for information about a single customer to be spread across a number of different and incompatible databases. Until recently, Oracle, a software giant that makes database programs, operated more than 100 different databases worldwide for its own customers and 70 for its human-resources department. If anyone wanted to find out the exact number of Oracle employees, it would take weeks of searching—and by the time the answer was found, it would already be out of date.
Customers of a mobile-phone company can easily discover how well-integrated the company is. All they have to do is telephone their mobile-phone operator and ask how much airtime they have used this month. The chances are that the people on the customer-service desk will be unable to tell them, because their computer is not linked to the firm's main database. When a customer has ordered a PC and it does not arrive within a week, as promised, the person on the other end of the line will probably be unaware that this is because the company is short of a single part, and that the caller could have his machine within days if he changed his order just slightly.
One explanation for this digital Tower of Babel is that information technology is a complex beast. Bridges between applications usually have to be hand-coded—a tedious and unpopular job—by in-house programmers or systems integrators. But it is not just technology that is to blame; political and economic reasons are at least as important, argues Ole Hanseth, a scientist at the University of Oslo who has studied the dynamics of IT infrastructure in global organisations. Departments have built their own systems and are wary of integrating them with others because they fear they will lose some of their autonomy and thus their power.
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