New Products Enable Software Standard for Internet Information Distribution; TIBCO's TIBnet Product Family Supports Implementation of Publish and Subscribe

Business Wire, Dec 9, 1996

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 1996--TIBCO Inc., an international leader and pioneer in communications middleware, today announced the TIBnet family of products, a complementary set of software tools for implementing publish and subscribe software applications over the Internet and other Wide Area Networks (WANs), both public and private.

Publish and subscribe is the proposed new industry standard for the "push" model of information distribution on the Internet. TIBCO's TIBnet 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.

The key concept behind publish and subscribe is that when an event happens, interested parties are notified. TIBnet events are published with "Subject" labels (a process TIBCO calls Subject-Based Addressing) that a subscriber uses to register an interest in content, such as the score of a football game or the inventory levels in a warehouse. When an application using request/reply for information dissemination is upgraded to publish and subscribe, network traffic is reduced by 50% or more.

"The combination of internetworking technology and the publish and subscribe service features creates a major architectural break with the past," said Charles Giancarlo, vice president of business development at Cisco Systems, Inc., the leading supplier of internetworking equipment.

"Instead of the usual search processes used to find information on the network, the information can be delivered directly to the user by describing the information and allowing that information to find the user."

TIBCO's TIBnet products, which are scheduled to ship in the first half of 1997, include:

TIBnet Engine

A low cost software component that runs on each computer participating in a publish and subscribe system. It connects off-the-shelf applications through Active X controls and Java.

TIBnet Software Developers' Kit (SDK)

A programmer's library for developing custom publish and subscribe applications in the Java, C and C programming languages.

TIBnet Firewall Proxy

Gateway software for the boundaries of a network entity (such as between an organization and its Internet service provider) which allows the management of information flows by subject.

TIBnet Internet Service Provider (ISP) Kit

Software caches and gateways for use inside the fabric of an Internet Service Provider and which enable ISPs to build reliable multicast domains and route subject-based traffic efficiently.

TIBnet Publishing Toolkit for Java

Specialized application development tools for high-volume publishers, including information viewers and viewer repository management tools.

TIBnet Subject Name Server

A registration system which provides mappings between subject names and Internet multicast addresses.

Pricing for TIBnet products will be announced at the time of shipment.

Internet Leaders Endorse Publish and Subscribe

More than a dozen Internet industry leaders including Cisco Systems, CyberCash, Informix, Infoseek, JavaSoft, Sun Microsystems, Verisign, NETCOM, and others announced today their support for publish and subscribe technology in the hardware and software infrastructure of the Internet.

"The TIBnet technology, and the whole notion of publish and subscribe, is ideally suited for what it is we have to do in terms of managing our digital IDs," said Stratton Sclavos, president and CEO of Verisign, a leading provider of digital signature and digital certificate technology.

TIBCO Products

TIBCO develops and markets a full range of tools and applications based on its TIB (The Information Bus) 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, 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.