Business Making Progress

Exciting news: Progress Software Acquires Corticon

Today, Progress announced the acquisition of Corticon, an industry leader in the Business Rules Management System (BRMS) market. I’m incredibly excited about this acquisition. I want to take a moment to talk about why we made the decision to acquire Corticon and why I’m so thrilled.

As you know, Progress is the “responsive business specialist”. A responsive business is one that can see how effectively it is running right now and over time, that can proactively address opportunities and threats, and can continuously improve the performance of its business operations. One key part of the responsive business is decision management – making decisions in the moment. And that’s what Corticon specializes in. Corticon delivers a business rules engine that automates business decisions, enabling more efficient and responsive operations. So whether it is a complex set of rules to decide if someone qualifies for an insurance policy, or to decide whether fraud is going on, or to decide on whatever business decisions need to be made, Corticon enables that complex decision logic to be defined simply and executed efficiently. Pretty useful stuff!

The really cool thing about Corticon is that it is safe to put in the hands of a pure business user. Corticon offers graphical tools to compose rules that can automatically detect conflicts and loss of integrity in rule sets at design time. This contrasts with having to do comprehensive run-time testing using other rule approaches. With Corticon, you can detect problems before you go live. You have the necessary guard rails to de-risk the system and to improve time-to-value. That fits perfectly into Progress’ vision of empowering the business user alongside the business analyst and IT user.

Corticon will be integrated into Progress’ RPM Suite. This will combine Corticon’s BRMS with Progress’ Business Process Management (BPM), Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Business Analytics. Through the Progress Control Tower, the vision is that a single command and control interface can provide visibility and control across your business. As IDC’s Maureen Fleming said, "high quality and comprehensive rules and decision services capabilities are required for a best-of-breed platform." And we believe Corticon is the best rules engine out there. Also the Corticon team are fantastic and we welcome them whole heartedly into the Progress family.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to take a minute to view this video from Dr. Mark Allen, founder of Corticon. You’ll agree, he had remarkable vision in 2000 when he started the company. And by integrating it with our RPM suite, we are now offering customers a comprehensive single vendor solution.

We’re excited to add Mark Allen and the rest of his team at Corticon to the Progress family and are looking forward to offering our customers a better way to manage their businesses in real-time.

Our 2012 Predictions: What to expect in capital markets

What will we see for capital markets in 2012?  The countdown to 2012 has begun. On the capital markets horizon is a great deal of change – no surprise to those following this year’s rollercoaster of rogue algorithms and regulation tension. So with no further ado, here are our capital markets predictions for 2012:

 1. Billion Dollar Blunder. At least one financial institution will take a billion dollar (or more) hit when a rogue algorithm goes wild. The algo will go into an infinite loop, taking on an irreversible and un-hedged position, which cannot be shut down. Losses will challenge those by human rogue traders, which banks and financial institutions will prevent from happening next year.

2. Occupy HFT. The public, government and regulators will start the "Occupy HFT" movement -- a popular uprising against the ultimate elite of those making money in this climate. Despite immense financial industry pressure, regulators in both the US and the EU will be panicked by investor and political disapproval of HFT and will rein it in with draconian rules and controls.

3. SEFs Spur Splash Crash. Swaps execution facilities (SEFs) will revolutionize OTC derivatives trading, enabling them to be traded electronically. This, in turn, will lead to increased risk of a cross-asset class swaps "splash crash" which will confound regulators, who have little understanding of these markets.

4. Global Regulation Rocks. Countries will finally realize that regulatory harmonization is a good thing and that individual self-interest is not. Banks and financial services firms will realize that they need to think like regulators, taking control of internal surveillance and compliance before regulators make them do it.

5. RICs Get Smarter. The RICs in BRICs are getting smart order routing and gearing up for an increase in algorithmic trading. This, coupled with looser regulations, will begin to attract regulatory arbitrageurs and Volcker Rule escapees.

6. The Wild East. The West's supremacy in financial markets will further decline as new trading regulations - the Volcker Rule in the US and MiFID in Europe - create a surge of regulatory arbitrage favoring more lightly regulated geographies such as Russia and China. Wall Street and the City of London will lose human and financial capital as a result.

7. Financial Terrorism. An exchange or trading destination will be hacked by financial terrorists intent on manipulating markets for political gain. This will lead exchanges and ECNs to add more stringent monitoring and market surveillance capabilities.

8. Head in the Clouds. Explosive growth in foreign exchange trading and SEFs means that participating firms will require complex hosted solutions. Even the smallest FX broker needs aggregation and pricing services which require a big technology footprint. SEFs present new challenges as swaps markets attract algorithms and require surveillance.

9. Crime & Punishment. Regulators are cracking down hard on financial fraud and market manipulation and they will bring in some big fish in 2012. Prosecutions and punishments will increase in size and in impact.

There you have it – nine predictions for capital markets in 2012. What are your thoughts on these predictions, and have we missed any? Comment below, or tell us on Twitter at @DrJohnBates or @ProgressSW.

Do you know Dr. John Bates?

If you don’t, get to know him. Though not a native of Massachusetts, it’s safe to say, “he’s wicked smaaht”. Not only is he smart, he’s really a genuine, nice person.  Recently, Dr. John Bates was named as one of the Top 10 Innovators of the Decade for Capital Markets, in which he has an extensive background. He helped pioneer new techniques in algorithmic and high frequency trading, real-time risk, and market surveillance. He was also a co-founder of Apama, a complex event processing (CEP) technology provider that Progress Software acquired in 2005.

Last year John became a member of the newly established Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) for the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC is an independent agency with the mandate to regulate commodity futures and options markets in the United States. Most recently, he joined the blog roll over at the Huffington Post – his most recent post is From Icebergs to Autos, Effects of the Japan Earthquake Are Long-Lasting.

If you haven’t already, get to know John. I promise you, he’s a man worth knowing professionally, and if you are lucky, personally.

• Follow him on Twitter (@drjohnbates)
• See if he’ll confirm you as a friend on Facebook
• Watch him on YouTube
• Read what he has to say on our Apama and Business Making Progress blogs
• Listen to his CNBC interview Is a 'Splash Crash' Next?
• Check out his Executive Profile on Boston Business Journal

Red Flags in Morning, Firms Take Warning

A pattern is emerging within new financial services regulations where regulators and financial services firms deploy monitoring technology to "red flag" potential issues such as risk, position limits, errors and manipulation. The "red flags" raised would then alert the relevant personnel or authorities.

In the case of the Volcker Rule, prohibiting banks from proprietary trading and investing in or sponsoring hedge funds or private equity funds, the authorities would use a three tiered approach (http://tinyurl.com/2bh9ot3).  First "tripwires", such as the length of time a trader holds a position, its size or riskiness, would alert banks’ compliance departments  who would (#2) quiz the trader on the nature of the position. And (#3)regulators that keep inspectors on banks’ premises would see the tripwires and monitor both traders and compliance departments.

Over at the CFTC, regulators are looking at a similar approach to monitoring and controlling position limits on products such as oil and metals with a "points" system that would give the CFTC monthly reports that it could use to red-flag traders with large positions (http://tinyurl.com/2ugbdh6).

The tracking and red flag approach is the latest step in increased monitoring of trading operations with the ability to take response before it’s too late. At Progress, we have been advocating using monitoring and surveillance technology to help catch inside trading and avoid fat fingered trading errors for years. With new regulations, monitoring becomes not only mandated but more complicated. Red flags are likely to be flying all over the place within as little as months, both inside and outside financial services firms, presenting a fine opportunity for our Responsive Process Management software solution.

As the financial services world becomes more compliant, the ability to manage red flags becomes more critical. Every process within a financial services firm must be scrutinized, from trade entry to risk management, to analyse and understand internal and external events. This take sophisticated technology. This is where Progress Software's RPM software fits in. According to technology research firm Ovum: "Unless an organization has already made a significant investment in creating an operational responsiveness solution around best of breed products, it will be worth seriously considering the competitive advantage and improved effectiveness that could be achieved by deploying RPM."

Ovum noted in a Technology Audit note that multiple technologies are required to gain a comprehensive insight and respond more rapidly to changes to the environment. These include: business process management (BPM) to model, implement, and execute the processes; business analytics to determine how effectively the processes are working; complex event processing (CEP) to understand the implications of many streams of internal and external events; business rules management to determine the appropriate actions for a given set of conditions and variables; and visibility into end-to-end transactions to track and audit their progress.

The interrelationships between all of these components and the vast amount of information that has become available must be understood before its impact on processes can be ascertained and appropriate tuning performed. In other words, RPM is the answer.

RPM can monitor an increasing number of information feeds, both within or external to the organization, then apply business policy and governance rules, then automatically tune the  established process or alert a human decision-maker (if necessary) and present him/her with current, relevant information on which to base the most appropriate response.

According to Ovum: "All of these individual capabilities already exist (at different levels of maturity), but the cost and complexity of integrating these into an effective business solution is beyond the means of most organizations. Hence Ovum believes that the requirement identified by Progress represents a genuine market opportunity." Well said. 

 

How Being Complex Makes Transaction Assurance Simpler

I have been seeing an increasing amount on interest in the marriage between Business Transaction Management (BTM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). On July 29^th Dr Dobbs Journal published an article called Complex Event Processing: IT Liberator or Over-Engineering Hell? This article was about the synergy of BTM and CEP (although I felt it was rather biased towards one company). Also, last week Jean Pierre Garbani at Forrester published this blog in which he discussed the evolution towards BTM and CEP working together.

Business Transaction Management is a rapidly growing area of Application Performance Management (APM). BTM enables users to look into the transaction flows within their business and ensure everything is running as expected. BTM enables problems in transaction flows to be discovered – such as a bottleneck in an important business process. The really appealing aspect of BTM is it can do this without the need to change the applications in the business; BTM can “discover the transaction flows” by tapping non-intrusively into the flows going through application servers, middleware buses, business process management systems and other systems within the environment. Over time, BTM can build up a picture of the environment’s business flows, look inside the transactions and flag up immediately problems that can really hurt the business.  Thus BTM works really well in legacy environments – not just modern SOA environments. And of course it appeals to business executives and operations users – not just IT users.

Complex Event Processing is the ability to correlate events flowing through a business  - to identify patterns in real-time. These patterns might indicate opportunities and/or threats to the business that have just happened, are in the process of happening or are likely to happen right now. Events are occurrences in the business, such as stock market quotes in trading, call data records being generated in communications or packages changing location in logistics. An example of a real-time opportunity is a trading “statistical arbitrage” opportunity – to sell one instrument and buy another at a micro profit; another is the ability to upsell something to a customer who has just purchased an item on their credit card – based on their spending and buying patterns, their location and context. Threats to be detected include risk exceeding a certain key level in a bank or gaming fraud occurring in a casino. This kind of business level visibility and immediate response also appeals to business users as well as IT.

Listening to the descriptions of BTM and CEP, does it sound like there is a little overlap? Well there is some. What BTM is really good at is non-intrusively discovering process endpoints and the events they exchange – and then tracking these events. What CEP is really good at is correlating complex real-time business events in real-time, including arbitrary user-defined patterns, which can evolve over time as the business evolves. So it makes perfect sense to put these capabilities of BTM and CEP together. For BTM this strengthens the real-time correlation and pattern detection capabilities. For CEP this enables discovery of services without the need to do expensive and time-consuming instrumentation of the environment.

At Progress we have two leading products in the BTM and CEP categories: Actional and Apama. We believe that BTM and CEP capabilities are converging for certain business use cases, so as part of our Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite we now provide seamless integration between these capabilities. Of course RPM does much more than that. More on that later!

Evacuate the Dancefloor

I just posted a blog entry on how changes in capital markets regulations may lead to out of work traders joining hedge funds. It may be a culture shock without the big bank budgets - but advanced trading technology is not out of reach.

See the full article here: "Evacuate the Dancefloor".

The Busy "B" in BRICS

I just published a blog posting on how Brazil has seen booming growth in algorithmic trading over the last couple of year - with Progress Software right at the heart of it:

See the full link here

Algorithmic Terrorism

I just posted a blog on the potential of algorithmic trading terrorism -- can a "denial of service" style attack cripple world markets? See the full posting here:

Blog Post: Algorithmic Terrorism >

Smart - But Is It Smart Enough?

Today Nasdaq group purchased Smarts - a provider of market surveillance. This is an interesting development . Read the full post on our Apama blog :

Smart- But is it Smart Enough >

Beware the weight-challenged digits

Fat fingers (or weight-challenged digits - for the more politically correct :-) ) are trading errors that can have catastrophic consequences. And they've been happening a lot recently!!

Read my full blog post here.

CFTC Launches Technology Advisory Committee

Yesterday the CFTC, the regulator in charge of Futures and Options markets, announced a new Technology Advisory Committee (TAC), chaired by the very capable Commissioner Scott O’Malia. Read the complete article.

I am absolutely delighted to be included in the group of experts that the CFTC has called together to form the TAC. I am joined by an extraordinary group of some of the industry's top executives from banks, brokers, trading firms, exchanges and clearing firms as well as some very impressive academics. On Wednesday, July 14th (tomorrow as I write), we will meet to discuss the impact of high frequency and algorithmic trading on the markets, including whether algorithms may be implicated in the May 6th 'flash crash'. From this, we’ll discuss what recommendations we have for regulation of and/or best practices for algorithmic and high frequency trading.

High frequency and algorithmic trading are essential for efficient execution and alpha generation in a complex, multi-asset, fast-moving world. However, there are a number of accusations that have been made against these forms of trading, including that they may aggravate volatility and may even have caused the ‘flash crash’. I believe evidence from the TAC participants will exonerate the accused.

I am hoping that our meetings will result in solutions that not only head-off future ‘flash crashes’, but also help exchanges, banks and brokers to better monitor and police trades. The proactive use of real-time monitoring systems can alert regulators to problems before they become a crisis. Monitoring technology can 'see' major price and volume spikes in particular instruments, how often they happen and maybe even why, and whether a pattern in market behavior caused them. It can also tell how much trading is potentially market abuse, for example, insider trading might be detected by correlating unusual trading incidents with news releases and market movements. (The FSA, for example, thinks that 30% of trading around acquisitions is insider.)

It is now possible to apply high frequency techniques to not just trading – but also to market monitoring, surveillance and pre-trade risk checks – for regulators, exchanges and brokers. The technology is out there (with proven approaches built on next generation platforms such as complex event processing or CEP) and it needn't be expensive. The CFTC's TAC is a positive step in the right direction. I look forward to the meeting and will let you know how it goes! Follow me on Twitter @drjohnbates where I'll Tweet when possible.

Regulation: Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater

We are still feeling the repercussions of the "Flash Crash" in the markets. Both the SEC and CFTC have been trying to figure out what happened and what to do about it. Of course the Flash Crash threw salt in the open wound left open from the worst recession since the 20s -- which many still blame on greed in the Cap Markets space.

The CFTC is forming a panel to meet in July - a technology advisory committee that will hold hearings to help the agency look into issues such as co-location, swap execution facilities and high frequency trading. The first hearing is on July 14 when they will discuss high-frequency trading: read the article.

The CFTC said the committee will "discuss how technology is being developed across the industry, how the CFTC should oversee such technology, and what the future holds for technological advancements in our markets so the CFTC can stop playing catch-up, as it has for so long."

We welcome the CFTC hearings into high frequency trading. Regulators are in a tricky situation right now trying to balance populist anger against HFT firms with the need to keep our markets safe for investors. The CFTC and other regulators need to be able to police markets to prevent fraud and trading errors, while - at the same time - ensure that US markets remain competitive. We don't want to over-regulate and sacrifice business to looser regulator regimes; this would be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Let's keep our economy strong. My motto with regard to regulation of trading: POLICE don't RESTRICT. But of course this means high quality policing in real-time, and this needs increased transparency and new approaches to markets surveillance across fragmented markets and real-time pre-trade risk management.

CEP consolidation continues

It’s been another remarkable week. I told my wife there would be a lot of traveling for me in the first part of the year and I was right. Last week was New Jersey and New York. This week was Dallas Fort Worth and Silicon Valley. I’ve been visiting key customers, journalists and analysts.

This week has also seen further consolidation in the CEP market. I have been predicting that there could not be a stand-alone CEP market and that CEP will either find a home in applications, databases, stacks or business application platforms.  In this case Sybase has snapped up Aleri to extend its database business into the CEP domain, as well as solutions in the risk space. Aleri are a good company with good people and good products. They come from the “in memory database” perspective but developed a high performing CEP engine and learned lessons from real customers that a SQL approach is not adequate to address real applications, and embedded actions statements are need within a CEP language. Also they learned that the best way to sell CEP is not as a technology but as solutions.

I think Sybase have made a smart move – for probably a bargain price – judging by the release that says they acquire the assets only. I wish my friends at Aleri all the best for the future.

Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive

Today Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion http://web.progress.com/inthenews/progress-software-co-01112010.html. I believe this heralds the beginning of a very exciting phase for Progress Software. Now Progress has become a leader in Business Process Management (BPM). But more than that, combined with our other solutions, Progress is now uniquely able to empower businesses to be operationally responsive – through responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes. And this is critical to keep modern businesses competitive.

 

You might wonder about the journey Progress went through to realize what the market needed. It was all about understanding the emerging needs of our customers and where they needed their businesses to go. The part of my job I enjoy the most is spending time with customers and understanding what pain points they have - with the ultimate goal of working with them to address the pain and making them highly competitive.

 

Over the last couple of years I have been hearing more and more from customers about the need to be operationally responsive. For example, many customers have expressed their desire to proactively – and often in real-time - address the needs of their customers and respond to the behavior of their competitors. The goals are to win new business, increase customer satisfaction and triumph over their competitors. These findings hold true whether the customer be in banking, insurance, communications, travel, transport, logistics, energy, gaming or many other industries. It could be British Airways ensuring their high value customers are looked after first in the event of a flight delay, or wireless carrier 3Italia pushing real-time offers to their customers based on their profile, activity and location, or maritime logistics provider Royal Dirkzwager dynamically adjusting the course and speed of a container ship to optimize fuel usage, based on weather conditions and port berth availability.

 

Operational responsiveness is thus about being highly responsive to opportunities and threats – and even anticipating such scenarios. Market research supports what I’ve been hearing, such as the recent survey by Vanson Bourne http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/companies-stuck-in-o-10062009.html – suggesting Operational Responsiveness has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

 

There are a number of business facing solutions that have shown great promise in addressing operational responsiveness. One of those is Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). This enables businesses to discover their business processes and gain visibility on the effectiveness of these business processes – even if they are built in a wide variety of heterogeneous technologies and work across legacy applications. BTA non-disruptively discovers business processes – without any modification to existing applications – and monitors to ensure processes run to completion. BTA also discovers bottlenecks and hotspots in the processes – enabling businesses to understand just how efficiently they run.

 

Another important solution is Business or Complex Event Processing (BEP or CEP). This enables business users to model the detection of and reaction to patterns indicating business opportunities and threats in real-time. Examples could be an opportunity to up-sell to a customer on the web-site now (opportunity) or risk exceeding a key level (threat).

 

And then of course there’s Business Process Management (BPM). This enables business users to model and execute a business process flow. BPM is also widely used for Business Process Improvement (BPI) – the re-engineering of (parts of) existing processes to improve their effectiveness.

 

The really cool thing we realized in talking with our customers is what happens when you use BTA, BEP/CEP and BPM together. Suddenly businesses are empowered to discover how effective they run, to detect opportunities and threats dynamically and to invoke business processes in response. The business becomes dynamic and responsive. Business users can take control and model the behavior they want their business to exhibit under certain circumstances, and through dashboards they can track the effectiveness of the business. Over time, the areas of the business processes that should be improved can also be detected.

 

Progress already has leading products in BTA and BEP/CEP with Actional and Apama. Progress chose Savvion to complete the story for a number of reasons. Savvion has a history of innovation and is a leading pure-play BPM provider. But Savvion also has a very rich platform, which includes not just BPM modeling and execution, but also an event engine, a business rules engine, a document management system and an analytics engine. The fact that Savvion enables business processes that respond to events means it immediately works well with Actional and Apama. And with high performance, scalability and availability, Savvion fits perfectly into Progress – where we pride ourselves that all of our products exhibit these characteristics.

 

In summary, Progress is now a best-of-breed BPM vendor – and not just at the departmental level – but at the enterprise level. But we’re also more than that. Our goal is to enable operational responsiveness and ensure our customers gain competitive advantage through the power of responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes.

Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive

Today Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion http://web.progress.com/inthenews/progress-software-co-01112010.html. I believe this heralds the beginning of a very exciting phase for Progress Software. Now Progress has become a leader in Business Process Management (BPM). But more than that, combined with our other solutions, Progress is now uniquely able to empower businesses to be operationally responsive – through responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes. And this is critical to keep modern businesses competitive.

You might wonder about the journey Progress went through to realize what the market needed. It was all about understanding the emerging needs of our customers and where they needed their businesses to go. The part of my job I enjoy the most is spending time with customers and understanding what pain points they have - with the ultimate goal of working with them to address the pain and making them highly competitive.

Over the last couple of years I have been hearing more and more from customers about the need to be operationally responsive. For example, many customers have expressed their desire to proactively – and often in real-time - address the needs of their customers and respond to the behavior of their competitors. The goals are to win new business, increase customer satisfaction and triumph over their competitors. These findings hold true whether the customer be in banking, insurance, communications, travel, transport, logistics, energy, gaming or many other industries. It could be British Airways ensuring their high value customers are looked after first in the event of a flight delay, or wireless carrier 3Italia pushing real-time offers to their customers based on their profile, activity and location, or maritime logistics provider Royal Dirkzwager dynamically adjusting the course and speed of a container ship to optimize fuel usage, based on weather conditions and port berth availability.

Operational responsiveness is thus about being highly responsive to opportunities and threats – and even anticipating such scenarios. Market research supports what I’ve been hearing, such as the recent survey by Vanson Bourne http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/companies-stuck-in-o-10062009.html – suggesting Operational Responsiveness has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

There are a number of business facing solutions that have shown great promise in addressing operational responsiveness. One of those is Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). This enables businesses to discover their business processes and gain visibility on the effectiveness of these business processes – even if they are built in a wide variety of heterogeneous technologies and work across legacy applications. BTA non-disruptively discovers business processes – without any modification to existing applications – and monitors to ensure processes run to completion. BTA also discovers bottlenecks and hotspots in the processes – enabling businesses to understand just how efficiently they run.

Another important solution is Business or Complex Event Processing (BEP or CEP). This enables business users to model the detection of and reaction to patterns indicating business opportunities and threats in real-time. Examples could be an opportunity to up-sell to a customer on the web-site now (opportunity) or risk exceeding a key level (threat).

And then of course there’s Business Process Management (BPM). This enables business users to model and execute a business process flow. BPM is also widely used for Business Process Improvement (BPI) – the re-engineering of (parts of) existing processes to improve their effectiveness.

The really cool thing we realized in talking with our customers is what happens when you use BTA, BEP/CEP and BPM together. Suddenly businesses are empowered to discover how effective they run, to detect opportunities and threats dynamically and to invoke business processes in response. The business becomes dynamic and responsive. Business users can take control and model the behavior they want their business to exhibit under certain circumstances, and through dashboards they can track the effectiveness of the business. Over time, the areas of the business processes that should be improved can also be detected.

Progress already has leading products in BTA and BEP/CEP with Actional and Apama. Progress chose Savvion to complete the story for a number of reasons. Savvion has a history of innovation and is a leading pure-play BPM provider. But Savvion also has a very rich platform, which includes not just BPM modeling and execution, but also an event engine, a business rules engine, a document management system and an analytics engine. The fact that Savvion enables business processes that respond to events means it immediately works well with Actional and Apama. And with high performance, scalability and availability, Savvion fits perfectly into Progress – where we pride ourselves that all of our products exhibit these characteristics.

In summary, Progress is now a best-of-breed BPM vendor – and not just at the departmental level – but at the enterprise level. But we’re also more than that. Our goal is to enable operational responsiveness and ensure our customers gain competitive advantage through the power of responsive, dynamic and predictive business processes.

My Baby Has Grown Up

I was proud to recently be appointed CTO and head Corporate Development here at Progress Software http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/progress-software-ap-12102009.html. But I don’t want anyone to take that as an indication that I won’t still be involved with event processing – au contrair. Event processing (whether you call it CEP or BEP) is now a critical part of enterprise software systems – I couldn’t avoid it if I tried!!

But taking a broader role does give me cause to reflect upon the last few years and look back at the growth of event processing and the Progress Apama business. Here are some observations:

• It’s incredibly rare to have the pioneer in a space also be the leader when the space matures. I’m really proud that Progress Apama achieved that. Our former CEO Joe Alsop has a saying that “you don’t want to be a pioneer; they’re the ones with the arrows in their backs!” Usually he’s right on that one – but in the case of Progress Apama, the first is still the best! Independent analysts, including Forrester and IDC, all agree on it. Our customers agree on it too.
• It’s tough at the top! I had no idea that when you are the leader in a space, many other firms’ technology and marketing strategies are based completely around you. I have met ex-employees of major software companies that have told me that there are Apama screenshots posted on the walls of their ex firms’ development centers – the goal being to try to replicate them or even improve on them. Other firms’ marketing has often been based on trying to criticize Apama and say why they are better – so their company name gets picked up by search engines when people search for Apama.
• Event processing has matured and evolved. Yes it is certainly used to power the world’s trading systems. But it’s also used to intelligently track and respond to millions of moving objects, like trucks, ships, planes, packages and people. It’s used to detect fraud in casinos and insider trading. It’s used to detect revenue leakage in telecommunications and continually respond to opportunities and threats in supply chain, logistics, power generation and manufacturing. It enables firms to optimize their businesses for what’s happening now and is about to happen – instead of running solely in the rear view mirror.
• Despite all the new application areas, Capital Markets remains a very important area for event processing. Critical trading operations in London, New York and around the world are architected on event processing platforms. The world’s economy is continually becoming more real-time, needs to support rapid change and now needs to support the real-time views of risk and compliance. We recognize the importance of Capital Market. My congratulations to Richard Bentley who takes on the mantle of General Manager of Capital Markets to carry on Progress Apama’s industry-leading work in this space. With his deep knowledge and experience with both Apama and Capital Markets, Richard is uniquely placed to carry on the solutions-oriented focus that has been the foundation to Progress Apama’s success.
• Even in a terrible economy, the value of event processing has been proven – to manage costs, prevent revenue leakage and increase revenue.  Progress announced our fourth quarter results today http://web.progress.com/en/inthenews/progress-software-an-12222009.html which saw a double digit increase for Apama and triple digit for Actional. Apama and Actional are used, increasingly together, to gain visibility of business processes without modifying applications, to turn business process activity into events and to respond to opportunities and threats represented by event patterns – enabling the dynamic optimization of business performance.
• But one thing I do believe: that soon there will be no such thing as a pure-play CEP vendor. CEP is part of something bigger. We’ve achieved the first mission, which is to raise the profile of event processing as a new technique that can solve hitherto unsolvable problems. Now the follow on mission is to ensure event processing finds its way into every solution and business empowerment platform. It is one of a set of key technologies that together will change the world.

I wish everyone Happy Holidays and a successful and profitable 2010 !!!

Progress Apama High Frequency Trading Podcast

In this podcast Dr. John Bates discusses high frequency trading and its relationship to algorithmic trading.

We're going on Twitter

Louis Lovas and myself, Giles Nelson, have started using Twitter to comment and respond to exciting things happening in the world of CEP (and perhaps beyond occasionally!).

The intent is to complement this blog. We'll be using Twitter to, perhaps, more impulsively report our thinking. We see Twitter as another good way to communicate thoughts and ideas.

We would be delighted if you chose to follow our "twitterings" (to use the lingo), and we'll be happy to follow you too.

Click here to follow Louis and here to follow Giles (you'll need to signup for a Twitter account).