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CEP Vendors Seeking Broader Audience
Usage growing, event processing looks to become enterprise-friendly
June 9, 2008
As financial firms continue to apply complex event processing (CEP) technology to an ever broader array of activities--not simply algorithmic trading or smart-order routing--vendors are upgrading their platforms and forging new partnerships to serve a more diverse capital markets audience.
Such efforts will be reflected at the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association's (Sifma) Technology Conference in New York this week, where a handful of CEP technology providers are announcing, or displaying, enhanced capabilities in areas including real-time pricing and profit and loss, risk management, market data, portfolio management and business intelligence.
Progress Software Corp.'s Apama division and Sun Microsystems, for example, are partnering on a new platform that will provide an "accelerator" framework for real-time market-making and pricing across asset classes.
"Given that CEP can reduce development times by 80 percent on average, it is building momentum among Wall Street firms beyond the initial projects," said Aite Group senior analyst Adam Honore. According to an Aite report issued last month--"The Data Utility Knife: CEP Cuts Into Enterprise Architecture"--trading accounts for 48 percent of all event processing usage, but growing areas include risk management (15 percent), market data management (12 percent) and real-time profit and loss (6 percent).
In response to the wider adoption, Bedford, Mass.-based Progress is introducing a new, easier-to-use application development tool--Apama Studio--with the rollout this week of the latest version of its Apama technology platform. "A business user or technology expert, or just someone trying to experience a Progress Apama demo, can now go in and start to use the development platform at various levels," said John Bates, general manager of Progress Apama and former Cambridge University professor, who developed the first iteration of the Apama system nine years ago.
Apama Studio offers several pre-built applications--including a smart-order router--that can be customized and accept third-party plug-ins. A single development interface allows users to build the business logic of a CEP application, choose connectivity adapters to data sources and devise graphical dashboards for monitoring purposes.
Apama is also touting an upgraded communications infrastructure designed to reduce end-to-end latency in event processing applications by up to 500 percent. "We were able to reduce latency in the interactions between the components of the core engine," said Bates. The communication of events between CEP system adapters used for market data and market access were also optimized.
Meanwhile, the relationship with Sun will allow the Apama platform to be ported to a Sun x64 server running the Solaris 10 operating system, providing a combined offering for the construction of real-time pricing engines. "Apama's accelerators shorten the time of building a particular class of applications," said Bates. "What we have created with the Real-Time Pricing Accelerator is a customizable way of real-time market-making."
According to Bates, the target user is anyone who wants to price instruments using real-time data, including market makers in bonds, foreign exchange, options and futures. "We expect that firms that adopt this technology early on will become the leaders in their respective markets," Bates added.
Reaching out to a broader audience by addressing growing concerns about integration costs and complexity, Chicago-based Aleri has introduced several upgrades to its CEP platform to make the connectivity process more user-friendly. Integration can make up 60 percent of the cost of a CEP project, according to Aite Group.
