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Coral8 and Apama Expanding CEP Capabilities
October 21, 2008
Platform upgrades from complex event processing (CEP) technology providers Coral8 and the Apama unit of Progress Software Corp. reflect a shared emphasis on broadening their reach, as well as the financial services industry’s relentless need for speed.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Coral8 on Oct. 20 released a new version of its product suite, touting its ability to deliver continuous business intelligence to firms by letting them quickly deploy CEP-based applications to analyze high-volume, real-time information such as market and trade data and customer interactions. Meanwhile, Apama is introducing today a framework that allows for easier, faster construction of applications for capital markets activities.
“Our financial services clients--large institutional brokerage firms--know that there are tremendous amounts of information hidden in their order flow,” said John Morrell, VP of product marketing at Coral8. “They wanted a CEP platform to take advantage of that on multiple fronts, to gain a better idea of liquidity, how fast and well they are executing their orders, better ideas of how money is moving in the market and … the impact of risk on different client positions.”
The challenge, said Morrell, was to develop those capabilities utilizing a “data warehousing style” while maintaining CEP’s real-time functionality. The advantage of the new approach, he noted, is that it allows firms to hold data for longer periods of time and distribute it among a greater number of users in more diverse ways. The 50-person company--half of whom are engineers and technical developers--spent five to six months on the enhancement, said Morrell.
The updated platform offers “large-scale, live analytic data sets,” says Coral8, that can be queried and accessed in multiple ways. “By combining live data with historical trends, Coral8 delivers a constant pulse of information that allows an organization to execute faster in the rapidly changing marketplace,” said CEO Terry Cunningham in a statement.
According to Adam Honoré, senior analyst at Aite Group, the effort will put Coral8 in closer competition with vendors such as Aleri and Oracle Corp. that support analytical processing and business intelligence needs. “It looks like Coral8 is becoming more of a one-stop shop, offering to provide both CEP and business intelligence services in one quick solution,” Honoré said.
However, Roy Schulte, VP and analyst at Gartner, suggested that Coral8 might be trying to replicate some of the capabilities of products from database technology providers such as Kx Systems, Skyler Technology and Vhayu Technologies Corp. “The database-oriented firms don’t have the dashboards and development tools that firms like Apama and Coral8 may have,” he said. “But in the database arena, they are ahead.”
Apama’s new capital markets framework comes with a host of templates based on the Bedford, Mass.-based Progress unit’s experience in working with financial service firms and is designed to let them build out their CEP usage beyond algorithmic trading to risk management, market data aggregation, market surveillance, pricing and smart-order routing.
“A number of our clients have adopted Apama in one particular area of their organization--the most common way would be to use it for algorithmic trading,” noted Giles Nelson, Apama’s co-founder and chief technology officer in Europe. “The new platform is a starting point for an organization to use CEP elsewhere. The vision we are painting is that when customers buy Apama, there is a road map already in place toward deploying our platform in other areas and ensuring that they get more value out of it.”
