Sybase announced today that it has added complex event processing (CEP) capabilities to its market analytics platform.
Since last summer Sybase has been encouraging users of the system--RAP Trading Edition--to integrate CEP technology from Aleri, Coral8 or StreamBase Systems. However, some firms balked at the staffing resources and development time required for integration.
According to Sinan Baskan, director of business development for Sybase’s financial services group, the RAP upgrade is based on Coral8’s event processing platform. “We have a licensing agreement with Coral8 that allows us to use and adapt the code as we see fit,” he said. An in-house development team modified the technology to work more efficiently with the SQL-based development language Sybase uses in its applications and databases, he added.
“We now have internalized CEP components that talk to our databases and data-feed transformers using Sybase native protocols,” said Baskan, which allows for more control over RAP’s functionality. He added that customers will be able to make their own alterations so that the platform suits their needs.
Baskan said that Sybase chose Coral8 because of customer feedback and the platform’s design, which is SQL-based and “closer to our technology roots, both in terms of language compatibility and internal architecture, making it far easier for us to engineer it into our own product.” Last week, Coral8 announced that it has merged with Aleri and will take on that company’s name.
Sybase will continue to work with customers who want to use a different CEP engine, said Baskan.
“This is not a giant leap forward for Sybase, but it could increase their customer base,” observed Adam Honoré, senior analyst with Boston-based Aite Group. The move puts them “on a level playing field” with companies such as IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp., which offer CEP capabilities to financial services clients, said Honoré, adding that Microsoft Corp. is rumored to be working on an in-house CEP engine to complement Velocity, its distributed in-memory caching product.
Kevin McPartland, a senior analyst with Tabb Group in New York, called the RAP integration part of a larger trend. “As CEP becomes more commonly used and understood, it makes a lot of sense to work that type of logic and structure into a technology platform that is intended to handle and process large amounts of data,” said McPartland. “As with most types of technology, the more tightly integrated the different elements are, the more efficient they tend to be and the faster they can operate.”
“The ability to react in real time to changing market conditions has become mission-critical,” said Raj Nathan, Sybase’s chief marketing officer. RAP users, he asserted, will now be able to make better use of streaming data from multiple sources and leverage the software’s ability to store and analyze real-time and historical data.
This article was originally published at SecuritiesIndustry.com.
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