Sell-Side Technology Awards 2014 Winners' Circle: Software AG

How have things changed for Apama since the acquisition by Software AG in June last year?
Considerably, is the short answer. When Software AG acquired Apama, it acquired a very strong business, which had a strong focus in capital markets, but was also heavily solutions-oriented. As a complex-event processing (CEP) vendor, we obviously had a streaming analytics platform, but on top of that we built and layered solutions, such as algorithmic trading and foreign-exchange (FX) e-commerce, in addition to the core technology. Software AG has a strong heritage in world-class software products, but less so on the solutions side. With Apama, it has a clear route not only into the capital markets, but also into the solutions space. The main change since the acquisition has been a large-scale and sustained effort to integrate existing Software AG products, so that we can build bigger, richer, faster solutions for the capital markets.

What would existing clients have noticed in terms of the new ownership?
Software AG brought across the entire support, account management, consulting, research and development team. The goal was never to lift some leading intellectual property and a client base, but rather to acquire the industry and technology expertise from a heavily people-oriented business as well. In terms of something new, we immediately set about integrating with other areas of Software AG to make the solutions and performance at scale in the capital markets even stronger. Clients can already see benefits in the latest product releases that focus on integration with complementary Software AG products as well as significant performance enhancements

What technology synergies have your clients been able to leverage as a result of the acquisition?
The Software AG vision for the acquisition was particularly clear: It wanted to combine Apama with complementary products from its portfolio, such as BigMemory for in-data memory management, and Universal Messaging for low-latency messaging—both of which are fundamental to capital markets use-cases involving big data and performance at scale. The commitment from Software AG is such that we’re already into the second release of the Apama software, after the acquisition. We released a new version of Apama recently that has significant performance increases, as well as the integration that we need into the Software AG products, which clients will notice immediately.

What business processes are most capital markets firms applying the Apama platform to at present?
The fastest area of growth is undoubtedly governance, risk and control. Companies are using low-latency technology, CEP, and messaging and in-memory data management—an entirely in-memory, low-latency architecture—in areas such as risk aggregation, pre-trade risk, and real-time suitability assessment.
Fundamentally, these areas all involve real-time or streaming analysis of very fast-moving big data. Not only that, but the value of the decisions you make increases the faster you make them. Or, to put it another way, the value tapers off dramatically the longer you leave it to act on that data. For some areas of risk and compliance, particularly pre-trade risk management, this is especially true, and it’s in these areas that we’re seeing the biggest uptake for CEP. But that said, the front office is still the heartland for CEP—we’re still seeing strong demand in areas such as FX e-commerce, which has been a strong market for a long time. There, Apama is being used for smart order routing, auto-hedging, pricing, and other aspects of e-commerce. Also, the heritage of algorithmic trading is still strong, particularly in the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. It isn’t just about risk and compliance—the traditional front-office applications are very strong as well.