SIFMA 2010 Sell-Side Wrap Up Part 1

CEP developers on a roll: Client wins, product upgrades

Complex event processing (CEP) platform developers continue generating news at the 2010 SIFMA technology conference, indicating either well-oiled public relations campaigns or, more likely, wider acceptance of these technologies across various sectors of the financial industry.

First, Progress Software has launched the Apama Capital Markets Foundation, a next-generation version of its Apama Complex Event Processing platform accommodating a wider swath of tools to develop trading applications.

New features support rapid trading strategy creation and testing, market surveillance tools and risk management functions.

Key components of the Apama Capital Markets Foundation include a new market data architecture driven by Apama's parallel event processing engine; support for new order types and functionalities for quant trading application development; capabilities to integrate with a wider array of third-party analytics providers; and a risk firewall delivering real-time pre-trade risk management.

Other features include an enhanced exchange simulator for strategy back-testing, as well as latency measurement tools.

Next, Tick data management and analytics vendor OneMarketData has won investment bank Jeffries and agency broker Instinet as clients of its OneTick CEP platform and database.

Jeffries plans to use the OneTick CEP and database for its algorithmic trading product strategy and quant trading operations. Factors driving the investment bank's decision included OneTick's seamless CEP and database integration, built-in analytics and low total cost of ownership, according to OneMarketData.

Instinet selected the OneTick system for its high-performance tick database and analytics system.

According to Instinet, as the broker's clients access its transaction cost analysis tools more frequently, an integrated tick data management system becomes crucial in order to collect and analyze data needed for effective TCA offerings.

Streambase and Solace Systems have partnered to integrate the former's CEP platform with the latter's middleware routing hardware in order to provide low-latency market input analysis and trading decision support.

Solace hardware will filter and route market data feeds into the StreamBase CEP engine, which will then facilitate fast and efficient data analysis and trading decisions, according to both firms.

Streambase has also revealed a partnership with graphics processing unit (GPU) developer Nvidia to further enhance the computing power and scalability of its CEP offering.

The Nvidia integration work will be hosted by StreamBase's Component Exchange developer community.

Bottom line: CEP providers are clearly making strides in terms of product improvements pertinent to financial firms' operational needs; ongoing efforts to push the functionality envelope by these vendors should attract more adherents to these capabilities beyond their early, high-frequency-oriented adopters.