Sell-Side Technology Awards 2013: Best Sell-Side Complex-Event Processing (CEP) Technology ─ Progress Apama

In the inaugural Sell-Side Technology Awards, Progress Software walked away with the gong for having the best CEP offering with its Apama CEP engine because it has been able to seamlessly address this evolution.

"There's a realization that CEP has moved beyond the relatively small niche of algorithmic trading into other areas of the enterprise, including risk and compliance," says Theo Hildyard, director and capital markets product manager at Progress Software.

Part of what separates the Apama solution from other CEP engines, Hildyard says, is the fact that it comes equipped with core services that capital markets firms require, such as market data handlers, order management and P&L functionality, and position services.

"If you are building a high-performance, low-latency application-for trading or for risk-with most CEP engines, you're effectively having to build everything from scratch," he says. "With Apama, we've taken a slightly different route."

It's also important to note that Apama uses a low-level virtual machine (LLVM) as its foundation rather than Java or C++. Hildyard says that this allows users to compile down to native machine code, which allows for improved latency. As sell-side firms look to get as close to near-real-time risk reports, this has become a key differentiator for Progress.

Part of what separates the Apama solution from other CEP engines, Hildyard says, is the fact that it comes equipped with core services that capital markets firms require, such as market data handlers, order management and P&L functionality, and position services.

"It executes a lot faster than other CEP engines on the market because we don't have the overhead of a Java virtual machine between our application and the hardware," he says. "So we're compiling down to highly optimized code that is optimized exactly to the kind of machine that you're running on, and we don't have the overhead of running the Java virtual machine."

Hildyard says Progress recently ran benchmark tests and found that the latest version of Apama, underpinned by LLVM technology, can produce more executions than C++ and Java for managing tasks like Black-Scholes reports.

PROGRESS SOFTWARE REACTION

"Progress Apama is committed to delivering a high-performance, flexible and customizable CEP platform for real-time front- and middle-office solutions. We are proud to once again have our efforts recognized and would like to thank our research and development team for keeping Apama on the leading edge of this important and expanding technology category. As winner of both the Buy-Side Technology and the Sell-Side Technology awards for best CEP technology, we would also like to thank all of our buy-side and sell-side customers for their continued loyalty. We rely on the trust they place in our technology to deliver reliable performance at scale to the core of their businesses. We look forward to continuing to deliver product innovation to our customers and the market into 2013 and beyond.

John Bates, CTO and executive vice president, Progress Software