Published in the February 2012 issue

A single cloud hangs in the sky over San Francisco Bay, like a rip in a blue curtain. Vivek Ranadivé, the CEO of a $4 billion software company, Tibco Software Inc. — and also the co-owner of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA — drives his black Mercedes S600 over the low bridge from Palo Alto to Oakland. And because the sky is unmarked except for that one spectacular little cloud and the morning fog is gone until tomorrow, it is as if he’s gliding across a huge blue screen. The scene looks choreographed: the Silicon Valley visionary driving to an important meeting on a perfect day, talking about ideas as big as the heavens.

“Everything’s real-time,” he says in a raspy voice with a thick, singsong accent, emphasizing certain vowels unexpectedly, so he sounds a little like an Indian Christopher Walken. “Everything’s event-driven. It’s all about the data.” He looks out over the bay, waves his hand over the wheel, and says that if you take all the data that was generated from the dawn of man to, say, the day Barack Obama became president, that’s x. And then if you add up all the data that’s been generated since then, in just three years, that’s 10x. We are drowning in data.

Ranadivé, born fifty-four years ago in Bombay, takes this simple fact as a challenge. He has built his company and become wealthy on the idea that we can master that deluge of data and use it to make the world a better place. That’s why he keeps talking about this new thing he developed called TopCom, Tibco’s latest pride and joy.

It is a private communications platform for the two hundred most powerful people in the world.

TopCom is being officially launched in late January at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is basically a customized, ridiculously secure version of tibbr, a platform developed by Tibco as a kind of combination Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, texting, and Skype. It is a private social network, essentially — in this case, for world leaders.

With tibbr, in addition to following people, you choose and follow subjects — issues, crises, topics of discussion, upcoming events. You don’t have to remember which people you’re supposed to include on an e-mail about a subject, because they’re all following it. You just post your message and the right people see it. You can talk one-to-one or to everyone who’s following the subject. When you use tibbr, you get the feeling it’s one of those innovations that five years from now we’re all going to think we’ve used forever.

Ranadivé’s company created the TopCom version specifically for the World Economic Forum, the organization founded in 1971 by the German economist Klaus Schwab, which gathers together the world’s business, intellectual, and political leaders to discuss common issues. Because the organization has a hierarchy, so does TopCom: The top two hundred WEF members — basically, the people who run the world — can speak to one another on a given subject, and then they can choose to loop in members from lower tiers (experts, academics, etc.) as needed, widening the pool of knowledge on whatever problem is on the table.

It is, Schwab says, a “Facebook for global leaders.” For example, Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda can post a video of himself — viewable only by the top two hundred — asking for help because a major earthquake has caused a tsunami that’s approaching his country. Minutes later, Schwab would see the message and call for an immediate videoconference among the appropriate world leaders to get Japan aid in the quickest way. CEOs of companies that have facilities near the impact site — there’s a Nissan plant close by, for example — could join forces for evacuation and figure out how to address interruptions to their supply chains.

The alert could then be extended to the next tier so that, for instance, experts on nuclear power and crisis management could instantly offer opinions on the likelihood of various disaster scenarios. Others could predict where aftershocks were most likely to occur. And on and on.

We live in the information age, but what Ranadivé saw was that as fast as information travels, it’s not fast enough. These kinds of conversations — between the Japanese prime minister, other world leaders, Schwab, and experts who could offer help during the impending nuclear disaster — took place over the days and weeks that followed the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan last year. With TopCom, Ranadivé argues, they could have happened within minutes and hours, possibly saving lives.

Tibco consulted with both the Japanese prime minister at the time of last year’s tsunami, Naoto Kan, and his successor, Noda, when it was developing its presentation for the WEF board of directors, to find out what would have been useful to them at the time of the disaster. Schwab, too, collaborated. The result, which will be on display in Davos, is the first time a global organization will introduce its own proprietary communications platform. The World Economic Forum is an extraordinary collection of minds. Every one of them is suddenly more closely linked than ever.

In the lexicon of computer hardware, a bus is connected to the motherboard — the foundation of any computing system. Ranadivé brought that idea to software: If all the physical components of a computer have a single hub, why not all the information floating through the software? Instead of a traditional hardware bus, an information bus. That’s what the Tib in Tibco stands for: “the information bus.” The company plucks seemingly disparate bits of data, often in real time — as opposed to “batch processing” at the end of the day, month, quarter — and makes them work with a singular purpose.

In the 1980s, Ranadivé used this theory to help transform Wall Street trading floors, bringing real-time market data to desktop terminals — his software powers most trading floors today. Since then, he has applied it to retail clients (two billion transactions a day for FedEx, every transaction on amazon.com), manufacturing firms, the financial sector (Tibco processes every dollar for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which comes to $1.2 quadrillion annually), tech companies (every time someone activates an iPhone with AT&T, that’s Tibco, as is every click on eBay — two million messages per second), the military, airlines (ever use an e-ticket?), casinos — he has thousands of clients.

Because of data — because, more specifically, of the technology that tallies and stores and disseminates data — we can know almost anything we want to know about our species. But there is so much data — purchases, sales, flights, withdrawals, deposits, sports scores, inches of rain, packages mailed, songs downloaded, e-mails sent, text messages typed, cell-phone calls made, cell-phone calls dropped, hours of television watched, passports issued, arrests, releases — that it can all seem to add up to nothing. A meaningless pile. “You can go on Twitter and find out what Shaq ate for lunch, but you haven’t really improved humanity,” Ranadivé likes to say.

His goal is to make sense of that pile. Tibco’s mantra: the right information to the right people at the right time in the right context. “I have this idea that math now trumps science,” Ranadivé says. “The simplest example is the thermostat in your house. You don’t need to have a Ph.D. in weather. Your thermostat simply looks at the temperature, and if it gets cold, it turns the heater on. And then the minute the temperature gets too hot, it turns the heater off. You don’t need to be a weather scientist to do that, okay? Like what we did for Reliance Communications. It’s the same thing. You don’t really have to know the why of something. Or the how. You just know if a and b happen, then c will happen.”

Here is what Tibco did for Reliance, one of the largest telecommunications companies in India: Reliance was adding something like three million wireless customers a month, but it was also losing about a million and a half, Ranadivé says. It hired Tibco to fix things. Tibco found that if a customer experienced six dropped calls in a twenty-four-hour period, he almost always switched providers. Reliance started monitoring every dropped call, and any time a customer got to five dropped calls in a day, he would receive a text message offering him free SMS messages if he topped up his prepaid card — if he resubscribed, essentially.

“Problem solved,” Ranadivé says. “I don’t need to be a psychologist and know why they’re switching after six calls and not ten or two calls. Math is trumping science.”

Other companies do this kind of thing — most notably divisions of Oracle and IBM that compete with Tibco. But for Ranadivé, this isn’t just data analytics. It’s not just cloud computing. It’s a philosophy. It’s a mission.

Ranadivé was seventeen when he arrived in Boston from Bombay. Back then, the rupee was not an easily converted currency. He was the well-off son of hardworking parents, but he had to beg the head of the Reserve Bank of India for dollars so that he could go to Boston. See, he told the man, he had seen this documentary about a school in Cambridge called MIT. It was a wonderful place where instead of listening to lectures, the students created things, built things, did things. Ranadivé wanted to be a part of that. He had to go. It was obvious to him. He had been accepted by MIT, but there was the currency problem. The banker relented, kind of. He gave Ranadivé enough dollars for one semester. Four years later, he graduated.

He says he was a punk back then. He is still something of a punk. A rival once stood up at a meeting and joked that he’d always thought that the Tib in Tibco stood for “that Indian bastard.” Ranadivé built a house a few years ago with a swimming pool that has an underground window, so from the basement bar you can look in and see people swimming. He yanks his employees out of meetings to challenge them to push-up contests in the hall. He once called Steve Jobs to ask him how to use Photoshop. At a dinner in New York one rainy night a few months ago, after speaking to a bunch of M.B.A.’s, he ordered the most expensive steak on the menu as an appetizer for the employees who were traveling with him. And listen to him in an interview in 2009, talking about his competition: “There are not that many people who can say that they have gone head-on against IBM and beaten them in a situation where IBM has thrown everything and the kitchen sink at a problem and lost.”

Ranadivé sometimes tells potential clients he can do what they want him to do even before he knows whether it’s possible. It’s a ballsy way to win business, but it’s also a way to motivate his company to find solutions, which is what Tibco is supposed to do. This attitude has allowed Tibco to push into all corners of our culture.

In Las Vegas, a casino might learn that when a customer is down $900, he’s likely to walk out. So when the customer is down $800, software flashes, and a floor manager can tap him on the shoulder and offer him a prime reservation at the steakhouse and four tickets to a show for him and his family. The bettor, refreshed and pampered, can resume his bad luck later.

In New York, Tibco is working with Con Edison to computerize the underground electrical grid to minimize power failures. When one transformer shuts down, instead of short-circuiting others around it on the grid, it can be immediately isolated.

Airlines can know before you hit the ground that your bag won’t arrive, so you don’t have to be the one to tell them that your luggage didn’t show up at baggage claim. They’ll be waiting for you when you land, telling you where your bag went and when you’ll get it. All the data that allows them to do this has always existed but was never harnessed.

Over lunch a few years ago, Ranadivé said that Silicon Valley today is like Italy during the Renaissance. He said that all these guys living in the same place — Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, himself, and others — reminded him of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, with its ring of busts of the men who are buried there: Michelangelo, Galileo, Rossini, Machiavelli. He said this not as a boast and not as a joke, but with solemnity. He believes he is making a contribution to the world that is potentially as valuable as any of theirs: to scan all the imponderable number of data points that make up the human universe for bits that, in the midst of the chaotic blankness around them, can work together as a coherent unit, like a single cloud in an otherwise endless blue sky.

Ranadivé steers the Mercedes off the freeway and onto the anonymous streets of downtown Oakland. Soon he’s entering a conference room six stories up in the offices of the Golden State Warriors, a team that won its only championship thirty-seven seasons ago.

He walks briskly because he loves this part, the part when he gets to tell someone about everything his company can do. Traveling with Ranadivé today are a few of his top guys, including Roger Craig, the former All-Pro running back who won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers — he does business development for Tibco. Waiting in the conference room for them is the Warriors’ new president, Rick Welts — tall, blond, slim, wearing a Warriors blue-and-yellow tie. He stands in the pristine blue-and-yellow room before a buffet of sandwiches, fruit salad, soda, water, and cookies. It’s a nice reception for an afternoon meeting. Which makes sense because, well, about a year ago, Ranadivé became an owner of the Golden State Warriors.

“Everybody’s all smiles,” Welts says as he shakes hands.

Without missing a beat Craig says loudly, “We’re making the world a better place!” He smiles a smile the size of his entire head. Welts grins politely.

The rest of Ranadivé’s team today, Wen Miao and Matt Quinn, set up a laptop so that they can translate the whole of Tibco’s mission as it pertains to the business of the Golden State Warriors into a short PowerPoint presentation. Ranadivé believes the Warriors can be a model of how an organization can revolutionize its operations through the use of real-time data. His vision goes roughly like this:

When a ticket holder arrives at Oracle Arena for a game, he could flash a bar-coded pass to enter the parking garage, sending a signal that he has arrived and allowing him quick and easy entry to the game. The computer system would know that at last week’s game, he bought two youth jerseys. It would also know that there’s a surplus of youth hats at the team store at the moment, so it could send him a text message offering a 20 percent discount on hats. When he’s in his seat, he’d be able to watch instant replays and other exclusive content on his phone. At the end of the third quarter, when the computer system showed that the concession stand near his seats had too many hot dogs, it could send him a buy-one-get-one-free offer — because it also knows that he sometimes buys hot dogs at games.

The right information to the right people at the right time in the right context. (Fans creeped out by this could opt out.)

Welts is fascinated. But he knows that all of this would require some powerful computing, and at one point he looks across at Ranadivé and asks him, essentially, what’s in it for Tibco.

Ranadivé pauses for just a few seconds before speaking very quickly. If we could do all of this, he says, then the Warriors’ arena would be like a live demo of virtually everything Tibco is capable of. If a potential client wanted to understand the value of real-time information, showing him the universe of possibilities would be as simple as attending a basketball game.

When Miao and Quinn start talking about the team’s fan database, Ranadivé says, “This is cool, Rick. Check this out.” Miao describes a sophisticated piece of software that can find duplicates in the fan database. Seems basic. Boring, even. But not only do false duplicates create unnecessary paperwork, they screw up the team’s ability to send out targeted promotional deals to individual fans, which are lucrative. And duplicates are very hard to find.

Say there are two fans, one named John Phillips and one named John Philips. They have different home addresses but the same e-mail address. Phillips is listed as having no children, but in a team Web forum he once wrote about taking his two sons to a game. Philips is listed as having two children. A human being studying the vast database might notice the odd overlaps between these two fans and might think to find out whether they’re the same person and had moved recently. The problem is, humans don’t sit around scouring databases looking for that stuff. Tibco’s software does, and it can notice things. It can suggest things, such as this might be the same guy, and that maybe he had moved and his name had been misspelled in one of the entries.

“The Department of Defense uses this,” Ranadivé says, smiling, eyebrows up. “Remember the Christmas Day bomber?”

On December 25, 2009, a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. He had enough plastic explosives strapped into his underwear to blow a hole in the side of the aircraft. As the plane drifted down over Michigan, Abdulmutallab covered himself with a blanket and tried to detonate the bomb. It didn’t work — he was tackled by fellow passengers and the flight crew — but the fact that he had been able to board the plane did not look good for the Department of Homeland Security. The guy bought his ticket with cash and didn’t check a bag on the long flight. His own father had warned officials in Nigeria that his son was missing and had been associating with Islamic extremists, possibly in Yemen. American officials had learned of a potential Al Qaeda plot, in Yemen, to use a Nigerian man in an attack on the United States. But after his father’s warning, a State Department check on Abdulmutallab didn’t show that he had a U. S. visa and should thus be placed on a no-fly list. And he had a valid multiple-entry visa for the United States.

The reason he slipped through? His name was misspelled.

A few months ago, the same month that Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of the 289 passengers, Tibco announced a major deal with Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division.

What propelled the company to that deal was the same attitude that yields most of its business: a sometimes ballsy belief that anything is possible.

Now Ranadivé is trying to get the most powerful people in the world — prime ministers, CEOs of every big company you can name, Bill Clinton, leaders at the White House — to use this social network he’s created just for them.

It would sound absurd, if it weren’t already happening.