Tibco Finance To Empower ETX Middleware With Capability Of Transaction Processing

Tibco Finance is planning further upgrades to, as well as a new aggressive marketing strategy for, its Enterprise Transaction Express (ETX) reliable-messaging middleware product that will transform it into an industrial-strength, guaranteed-delivery transaction processing system capable of spanning wide area networks.

This new strategy follows recent news that Tibco's revenue fell 30 per cent in 1996 to $77 million, after soaring 71 per cent the year before (TST, February 17). With an increasing number of brokerage firms looking to streamline their trading systems and to better manage risk, a more robust ETX could help Tibco turn things around.

Reuters attributed the drop in its subsidiary's income to three reasons: skewed figures during the boom years of 1994 and 1995; concentration on small and medium-sized rooms where Tibco is less well represented; and to management's increased focus on products for non-financial markets following the separation of Tibco into Tibco Software and Tibco Finance (TST, November 25, 1996).

According to a Tibco executive, Tibco's motive for revving ETX up is to boost revenues. "Leveraging the existing TIB [Tibco Information Bus digital data distribution platform] customer base with a product that does more than guarantee messages is, and obviously has to be, a priority," the executive says. "TIB customers obviously would like to leverage that technology across more systems and more platforms on a larger scale."

In addition to offering a more robust ETX to clients, Tibco Finance also wants its parent company Reuters to begin making active use of ETX in its own products, the executive adds.

"Tibco wants Reuters to use ETX as the basis for building a variety of applications that require guaranteed transactional delivery," the executive says, "and we are already beginning to see examples of that with Reuters Deal Manager (a treasury trade entry and position-keeping system), which has ETX embedded in it."

Tibco Finance vice president and general manager Tom Jasek confirms that "Reuters is certainly one client for ETX," adding that the version of Deal Manager with ETX embedded in it is still in pilot tests.

As far as Reuters's plans for embedding ETX in its two risk management systems, Kondor+ and Sailfish, Jasek says they both are "two other likely candidates." It's unclear how the recent decision of Reuters' UK and Ireland division to stop selling Deal Manager will affect the integration plans with ETX (see related story, this issue).

"Going forward," Jasek explains, "we want to take TIB and ETX, which have been used for reliable delivery of market data, [and make them capable of] order routing, where you need guaranteed delivery," as well as a host of other functions related to transaction processing.

"If you picture ETX as the middleware, we will be building systems around that middleware" to eliminate the need for entering trade data in disparate systems each time a firm wants to perform another function, he says.

"For example," Jasek says, "a user might want to enter a trade into a Reuters Deal Manager, but they don't want to have to enter that trade a second time into a risk management system and yet a third time into their own internal position-keeping system."

The central premise of a more robust ETX, Jasek says, is to make it possible for the system to publish transactional information into numerous applications.

To accomplish this, Tibco is working on a mainframe interface for ETX, since many brokerage firms' transactional services are mainframe based, Jasek says. "We are working on building an adapter to IBM's MQ [message queue software] into ETX, so a client can get transactional information reliably and swiftly out of their mainframe and [put it into] the publish and subscribe on the TIB," he says.

Other ways Tibco plans to make ETX more viable as a transaction-processing system include building interfaces between it and risk management systems, such as those from Infinity Financial Technology. Indeed, sources say Infinity has already been integrated with ETX at two European-based banks: ABN Amro and DG Bank (Dealing with Technology, February 7).

In addition, Tibco is building an adapter to Wilco International's Gloss trade management and position keeping software, so that, as Jasek puts it, a firm "can take transactions from their mainframe or from Wilco and roll it up into ETX."

Jasek says these advancements are scheduled to be accomplished within the next six months.

Once the vendor completes these transaction processing embellishments, he says, Tibco will take this concept of a full-blown transaction-processing system another step further by linking ETX to the TIB to enable a brokerage firm to internally disseminate information about its own trades--just as firms use TIB to disseminate third-party data.

Jasek says Tibco will accomplish this by caching trade information into an "in-memory database," which Tibco calls the Tibco Information Cluster (TIC). TIC will subscribe to all of the different trades, and then publish the information using the reliable functionality of the TIB as opposed to the transactional capability of ETX, Jasek says.

"The reason why we would disseminate this information in a reliable way is because it's not heavyweight, and it provides the broadest fan-out; we could serve hundreds of thousands of people without putting a strain on the system," he says.

In the meanwhile, Tibco is upgrading ETX by merging it with Transaction Express' (TE) superior ability to manage the load on the network (TST, February 3). The vendor has also recently introduced version 2.1, to allow system administrators to manipulate message logs.

But whether Tibco succeeds in its ETX transaction-processing initiative depends on retaining the firm's lead developers in the Tibco Finance subsidiary, as opposed to Tibco Software, according to a source close to Tibco.

"The positioning of ETX inside of Tibco is a little unclear right now. There is some talk of moving ETX development into Tibco Software, and if that happens, it would have dramatic implications for the financial community," the source says.

Currently, Tibco Finance is working on the ETX project, and Jasek says that work will continue.