Pioneering Real-time Computing: TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé (Part 2)

SM: What did you do after MIT?

VR: I did a couple of degrees at MIT. I did a bachelor’s, a master’s and part of a PhD, all in EE. While I was at MIT I started working as a consultant for the auto industry and became interested in robotics. I ended up taking a job at Ford to automate assembly lines. What they had me do was quite different and was not a good experience for me. Ford was not a good place to be at that time. The auto industry was not doing well, and the quality of the people there, the ethics and the culture were bad.

What I was doing was fairly interesting. I was putting microprocessors into cars. I didn’t like the cold of Detroit and the culture. Coming from MIT it was a bit of a shock. I ended up going to a company in San Diego called Linkabit that had been started by some MIT professors. The same founders later started Qualcomm.

They built very sophisticated satellite communications. In the middle of winter I landed in San Diego and it was 75 degrees. I decided then that I was never leaving California! I went to work for them and built some products. I was also involved with selling and building products. It was a great experience, but while I was at MIT I had also applied to Harvard Business School. I had deferred my admission and had kept deferring it. After I had deferred it a couple of times they told me I had to come now or re-apply.

In 1981 I ended up going back to business school and getting an MBA. While I was at school I started working with Fortune Systems, which had a very good vision. They took a position between a mini computer and a PC. They wanted to fill that gap in the middle. There were a whole range of new technologies available and they wanted to have a departmental computer. I hit it off with the guy who founded the company. I was going back and forth between Boston and the Valley, and I became his strategic guy.

While I was pursuing my MBA I started working for this company. The company itself was a rocket ride. It went from $0 to $200 million in sales in a very short time during the first PC bubble. It got me into the Valley and taught me a lot about what I wanted to do. While I was at the company I came up with my big idea as well as a value system.

SM: Would you care to share more about that?

VR: What I found as we were launching these computers was that the hardware was always done on time and on budget, but the software was never there. It was always late and over budget. My idea was to do software the same way that hardware was done. If you take the top off your PC or look at your chip, you see that the problem could be solved by looking at pieces which are tied together via a backplane or a bus.

The idea was to build a software bus. You would have a single interface. You convert the n-squared problem into the n-problem. If you have n things then you need n(n-1) back and forth interfaces to make them work together. That is where most of the effort is going. A software bus with a single API would allow applications to communicate.

A related notion was hardware interrupts. Why not have the software be event-driven or real time? When something happens, then that event goes wherever it needs to go. That is also where I invented the concept of public space addressing, in which you could publish and subscribe to information by subject name.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Pioneering Real-time Computing: TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé
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