Yahoo Inc is getting into the business portal and corporate desktop market through an alliance with Tibco Software Inc, a unit of Reuters Holdings Plc that filed of its initial public offering this week. The deal between the two will see the 13 free services that Yahoo offers, including the email, address books, travel reservations, message boards and so on delivered to corporate desktops using Tibco’s TIB/Active Enterprise set of products. An application programming interface provides a space for Tibco to insert specific content modules – things such as sales status, customer support, order and product status – into pre-designated places on the corporate desktop. The new service will be called Corporate My Yahoo!, but can be co-branded to suit the customer.
Ellen Siminoff, Yahoo’s VP business development says the service is already available and Yahoo will probably make its money from advertising, as it does with its regular portal, although there may be some fees if the corporations want highly specialized information, she says. Both Yahoo and Tibco will help customers with the customization process. All corporate information can be kept within the firewall, and Tibco says it will handle security issues customers may have.
Tibco has gone through many guises over the years, branding its technology and products as multicasting, push and now Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) – in other words, it’s always on top of the latest buzzword. It offers a suite of products that tie applications together, through adapters to back-end systems like SAP and PeopleSoft, data routing tools, content notification and delivery and publish/subscribe messaging. It could all be gathered under the umbrella term of middleware, but that’s not what the company likes to call them as it’s not very fashionable right now.
Yahoo struck a partnership with Reuters for on-line information feeds back in the fall of 1995, and later went to Tibco to provide the backend stock price feeds for Yahoo Finance. Speaking at a Tibco conference in San Francisco, Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle said that the company was separately extending its business model to direct services for small office and home office customers and beginning to offer what were previously applications in the guise of net services. He said some 30m users (out of 60m total) currently use the internet version of Yahoo for their start page.
