Software Licenses Improve For Tibco

Stronger license revenue garnered by middleware integrator Tibco Software Inc. led to higher net income during its first quarter compared with a year ago, CEO Vivek Ranadive said Wednesday.

Tibco reported revenue of $74.4 million and net income of $8.5 million, or 4 cents a share, in the quarter ended Feb. 29. Software sales, as opposed to revenue from automatically renewing maintenance contracts, accounted for $40.8 million of total revenue.

Net income a year ago was $1.7 million, or a penny per share, on revenue of $63.7 million. License income was $35 million, and maintenance and service revenue was $24.9 million. Tibco execs say they added 50 customers in the quarter, including Merrill Lynch, the London Stock Exchange, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Standard & Poor's.

The company is building a strong customer-facing field organization, Ranadive says.

Research-and-development spending declined in the first quarter over the same period a year ago. It was $13.1 million, compared to $17.5 million. Thursday, Tibco revealed the availability of Enterprise Management Advisor. The app is designed to enable IT managers to adjust underlying systems if a failure that threatens a given process is identified. Ram Menon, senior VP of marketing, says that at a financial institution, a server failure might result in an alert to the IT staff to create a bypass before business processes, such as receiving mortgage payments, back up.