Wall Street And Tech Conference Report

Jules and I wandered up to the Grand Hyatt around 10:30 for my panel at the Accelerating Wall Street conference that Wall Street And Technology magazine help on May 8th. There were about 80 to 100 registrants at the conference, but I have a feeling that a decent number of those were vendors, since from the second we arrived in the conference, we were accosted by a number of our old friends, like the guys from RTI, Aleri and BEA.

Malcolm West, who is the "Chief Software Architect" of HSBC, never showed up for the panel, so I was on the stage with analysts from Tabb and Aite. All in all, I would say that the panel went very well. The 35 minutes flew by, and I have a feeling that if we had more time, we could have fielded a lot more questions from the audience.

One of the questions that was asked was the possible marriage between distributed memory cache products and CEP products. I have blogged about this here before. I think that there are definite synergies, but the marriage would involve the CEP engine understanding a high-level C# or Java object. And there you have the problems integrating complex objects with the relational structure that is imposed by Streaming SQL. I have a feeling that the integration would be easier with Esper/Nesper.

Another question was about the use of Open Source products. That led me to talk for a few minutes about Esper, and my thoughts on providing an entire eco-system around the CEP engines. However, I get the feeling that Esper is becoming more and more widely used, as it is easy to download and evaluate and get "under the hood" with.

Thanks to the people from WS&T for inviting me ... and a shout out to Ivy Schmerken, whose work I have been reading since I started on Wall Street in 1986. People have come and gone at that publication, but Ivy is the one constant.

The next time I will be speaking is at the Gartner CEP Conference in September. We are taking bets on whether Opher Etzion can stay awake for an entire presentation without playing with his tie.


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