Turbo-charging the events in complex event processing

When complex event processing was in its infancy around ten years ago, it felt like a byproduct of academia, which in fact it was. In the beginning, it was clearly a solution looking for a problem. Early products were more akin to proofs of concept than anything else.

A lot has changed, though, and CEP offerings have evolved into the equivalent of next generation app servers. Those early customer deployments of many years ago, along with years of refinement and optimization, have made CEP an essential piece of the financial application puzzle.

There are a lot of CEP engines out there, because each industry has unique types and patterns of events, and it takes considerable industry expertise to provide a solution that can make sense of them. So where one CEP provider may excel at government use cases, another may hire experts from health care and focus on that industry. In capital markets, the clear leader is StreamBase. They have deep knowledge around, and solutions for, a wide range of financial use cases including FX data integration, profit and loss analysis, risk management, smart order routing, algorithmic trading, and compliance.

Today we announced a partnership with StreamBase to integrate their CEP solution with our hardware messaging offerings. A publish/subscribe messaging bus like ours is the best place to collect and aggregate events, and the natural way to distribute them for processing. So by pairing their CEP expertise with our best-of-breed messaging platform, we’ll accelerate time to production and reduce TCO for our mutual customers.

CEP engines work best when they get high value data, and hardware messaging is exceptional at filtering millions messages of raw input per second down to just the stream of information relevant to that application. This makes a very elegant scaling architecture, because both assets are used for what they are best at. Solace for filtering and distributing events, and StreamBase for real time analysis, correlation and decision making.

This alliance brings value to two key sets of customers:

• Solace customers that are tired of custom coding their complicated financial applications. StreamBase makes application development faster and easier, without sacrificing performance.
• Streambase customers that are having problems with the middleware (performance, scalability, TCO) feeding the event machine.

We have many mutual customers on the sell side and the buy side, and one commonality is that they’re always looking to improve their ability to reacting to changes to markets, data rates and regulations without continually reworking their applications.

Today’s CEP is sexy technology that can do a lot to make any business better, and with a massively scalable event backbone underneath it, the sky’s the limit. We look forward to working with StreamBase to bring many innovative new applications to capital markets.