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CEP Vendors Teaming With Market Data Technology Providers
May 22, 2008
Partnerships between complex event processing (CEP) technology vendors and suppliers of market data systems are producing a pair of new solutions for data analytics.
Chicago-based CEP provider Aleri announced Tuesday that it has teamed with Activ Financial on a platform that will allow users to apply real-time analytics to low-latency data. On the same day, CEP company StreamBase Systems and Vhayu Technologies, a provider of market data, tick databases and storage technology, said they will offer a solution for real-time and historical market data storage and analysis.
“Integrating Aleri’s CEP platform with Activ’s low-latency feed handlers will provide firms with the ability to easily and quickly develop and deploy high-speed data applications,” said Jeff Wootton, VP of product development at Aleri. Clients will be able to run their own analytics against raw data from Chicago-based Activ or on top of Aleri’s Market Liquidity Analysis engine, which aggregates order books across multiple execution venues. The platform will support all data sources available on Activ, including trades, quotes and full market depth.
The new platform is a time and money saver, said Wootton. If a firm wanted to integrate a CEP engine with its market data feeds, it would “have some work to do,” he noted, with the process taking days or possibly weeks. By providing “an integrated platform off the shelf, we are making these types of capabilities more accessible,” he said. “You install it and can start playing with it with minimal technical effort.”
Shawn Kaplan, business development manager at Activ, said that one of the largest challenges his company has seen is the technical complexity of patching together high-performance systems. “By having vendors work together more seamlessly, that complexity can be reduced,” he noted. “Too often, clients are asked to do the integration on their own. This [partnership] helps to solve that problem beforehand.”
Activ anticipates a 10 percent to 15 percent cost savings for customers using the integrated platform rather than building their own, not to mention the reduced development costs and implementation risk. In the long term, added Kaplan, users will not have to pay for maintenance costs.
Meanwhile, StreamBase and Los Gatos, Calif.-based Vhayu announced that they plan to provide a platform that combines event processing technology with a high-speed tick database, allowing customers to back-test their real-time analytics on large quantities of historical data.
StreamBase CEO Chris Risley said that the partnership is a response to clients’ calls for increased data management and analysis capabilities. “This will allow us to provide our customers with the real-time and historical data they need to get a complete picture of trading activity, combined with our low-latency, high-throughput event server, all in a GUI [graphical user interface] authoring environment,” he said.
“By combining StreamBase’s event processing platform and Vhayu’s Velocity product, we are responding to the market need for CEP software to be tightly integrated with a high-performance tick database,” added Jeff Hudson, CEO of Vhayu.
Adam Honoré, senior analyst with Boston-based Aite Group, said the two announcements reflect trends in the CEP industry: “There are all sorts of partnership deals going on in the CEP space at this time--Reuters and Progress Apama, Detica and Progress Apama, IBM acquiring InfoDyne.”
Honoré called the most recent alliances an effort to expand CEP businesses into more niche-oriented markets. “When you are trying to sell CEP technology, it’s a sort of ambiguous concept,” he noted. “But if you can say, ‘I have a market liquidity analysis tool that uses CEP,’ you are more likely to sell your product.”
