A company’s ability to share information within its organization or with suppliers and customers is increasingly regarded as a competitive advantage; and there’s a predictable feeding frenzy of suppliers selling the solution, whether it be publish-and- subscribe, push, messaging, queuing or other. Most, argues Los Altos, California-based real-time publish-and-subscribe ISV Talarian Corp CTO Tom Laffey, are simply Trojan horses for consulting. Unlike Tibco, Neon, Vitria and other publish-and- subscribe concerns, Talarian claims that less than 10% of its revenue comes from consulting. We’re a product company, not a service company, says Laffey. Publish-and-subscribe, distributed asynchronous messaging and push technologies are converging and Laffey says Talarian will remain a technology concern selling core plumbing and infrastructure services. It’s not interested in the burgeoning application integration market much of its competition is heading for, claiming its expertise is real-time information delivery, not application interfaces. Nor is it interested in re-wiring ERP enterprise resource planning applications with publish-and-subscribe like Crossworlds is doing for Baan and SAP. Laffey believes new Open Application Group and other standards in the area will reduce ERP data integration problem. Talarian counts Wall Street brokerages such as Bear Sterns among its 300 customers. The majority of brokerages, it says, had got to the point where upgrading their sophisticated home-grown information delivery systems to work with every new operating system release was simply not cost-effective; they want to write trading applications not patch operating systems. Talarian says Bear sterns evaluated and rejected other better known distributed technology such as Iona Technologies Ltd Orbix, which couldn’t effectively handle real-time trading data. Release 5.0 of Talarian’s SmartSockets software includes new support for ActiveX components; the delivery of fine-grain distributed objects rather than large programs; a smart cache for message storing; modules for implementing a rules-based inference engine, real-time display, filtering, monitoring and administration; flow control; burst-mode delivery; a threaded architecture; and 11 callback services for asynchronous messaging versus Tibco’s one. Within 30 days the company will reveal two partners it will use to provide message-mapping and within 60 days will describe plans to support IBM Corp’s MQSeries and Microsoft Corp MSMQ Falcon asynchronous messaging services. The 60-person Talarian claims to be profitable following two rounds of venture funding which netted it $4.5m It also plans to attract one further, and larger investment before an IPO offering. It’s opened an office in London for direct sales in the UK and to administer a European network of distributors.
