INSIDE MARKET DATA MINDS

Our customers want integrated real-time, historical and fundamental information from traditional and internal sources in a consistent and scalable manner. As customers move to separating content, distribution and display, we believe Tibco is in a unique position with its industry standard open distribution platform and state of the art display application. Our independence allows us to focus on providing tools to help manage costs and build content independent solutions in a cost-effective manner. By leveraging the key TIB technologies of publish/subscribe, subject-based addressing and self-describing data, customers can get the data they need when they need it.

We've recently delivered all necessary software for the LIFFE project in London, which includes MarketSheet and uses the TIB/Rendezvous infrastructure. With this release, we have the only fully scalable PC solution. As TIB/Rendezvous rapidly moves into our clients network infrastructure through embedding deals with Cisco or 3Com, our clients will be able to fully exploit the software's capabilities.

Tibco is making a large effort to be the open platform of choice for market data. That means two things: We need to make sure our APIs are powerful, consistent and available on our customers platforms of choice; and we need to make sure that our clients information providers are able to deliver their content into any TIB-enabled application.

Tibco has been at the forefront on middleware for the past 10 years. As middleware has become an increasingly common concept, it's no longer a question of education but of demonstrating our proven ability to deliver solutions.

Information providers continue to want to "own the desktop". As data gets more complex, the ability to deliver custom information solutions finely tailored to an individual's needs is seen as strategic. Content vendors traditionally try to control all aspects of display and distribution, thus locking clients into their content. This is in direct conflict with the needs of the clients. Tibco is working with major clients and with third party vendors to try to unlock such key information and make it openly available.

Obviously, the millennium and EMU are critical issues for our clients. We are working directly with our clients to provide Year 2000 and EMU ready software. Additionally, our clients need to react to the integration that is forced upon them as a result of mergers and acquisitions. Many of our clients have deferred systems decisions in favor of understanding and addressing these issues. However, many clients are beginning to realize that the solutions to these problems may actually lie in the adoption of middleware. Tibco believes that our publish and subscribe technology enables the easy integration of disparate and legacy systems and at the same time provides a long-term infrastructure for building strategic and value-added applications.