Power of Now is about the future. It is a book that details an emerging trend that will affect all of us, in one way or another, as we progress through the 21st century. It is a book about business, about speed, about competition, about technology, and about success in an increasingly global networked society.

I first met Vivek Ranadivé more than 10 years ago, when he called to ask if he could borrow a workstation (he still hasn't given it back). At the time-the early 1980s-Sun was still a young company, even by Silicon Valley standards, and the Internet, UNIX, personal computers, even networks, were all relatively unknown technologies. The future was beyond our greatest expectations. Today, technology has become vital to the speed and performance of business. How the "event-driven" enterprise works-its technology, its culture and organization, and its business practices-are what Vivek describes in this book.

The systems Sun and TIBCO first installed together were for the investment banks, which represent a sector of the financial industry that has the most demanding requirements of any industry I've encountered. All industries have mission-critical requirements, but the pace, pressure and vast sums of money flowing through the systems of the world's largest investment banks and financial trading firms add a unique drama - and impact - to their technology requirements.

Almost every significant business today is concerned about reducing the time it takes to accomplish a business transaction or bring a product to market. Processing customer orders in real-time, over the Internet or over the telephone, and being able to tell your customers instantly the status of their orders, has become almost commonplace.

Customers are demanding that everything be done faster-without sacrificing quality-they want what they want right away. At the same time, customers continue to demand more.

This obsession with speed and efficient business processes has only been further exaggerated by the emergence of the Internet. Technologies such as the Java platform and increasingly "intelligent" mobile devices, like cell phones, pagers, set-top boxes - even home appliances - are distributing computing power throughout all aspects of our lives. Sun's development of Jini is about extending Java to enable communications between all types of computing devices. With Jini, a laptop can plug into a network and immediately begin using "services" on that network, like printers. Functionality goes beyond mere plug-and-play and becomes "plug-and-work." But with all this connected computing power comes information. The Internet and the technology to integrate applications and computing devices will eventually mean complete information access and integration across the globe for business and personal use.

The new technologies that extend the reach and power of the computer and the network generate new possibilities for business. Those who can take advantage of these capabilities will benefit; those who can't will fail. It's really that simple.