The announcement came out this morning. A very short press release.
Don DeLoach (who was not mentioned in the press release) is leaving the company. As are others.
My main question is where this will leave the legacy Aleri product. As we all know, Sybase RAP uses a copy of Coral8. And where does this leave the new "Ohio" product, which was the magical combination of Aleri and Coral8.
I have a lot more to say about this over the next few days.
©2010 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.
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12 comments:
Sad to read about that. Should we assume Aleri is going bankruptcy as it is an asset purchase agreement?
I doubt that Sybase is ready for the level of innovation needed to turn CorAleri into a complete platform for developing real-time finance systems.
They will package all of it into a risk tool and maybe a quote aggregator, and that will be the end of its life as a general product.
They may also include some of the functionality in their ETL product.
My comments live on the StreamBase blog:
http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream_process/2010/02/sybase-aleri-acquisition-what-does-it-mean.html
Completely agree with your comment Hans about the ability of Sybase to execute, which was point #4 in my post: "Sybase has their innovation physics backwards."
That said, I don't they Sybase is after this just for the risk tools; the Coral8 stuff is really good and I'm hoping they will put a lot of energy behind it to build a great CEP platform?
- Mark
Rather than speculate, you can read about our plans: http://www.sybase.com/products/financialservicessolutions/cep and http://www.aleri.com/developers/blogs/sybase-acquires-aleri-products-and-hires-aleri-staff
Hi Jeff - followed that link, but it doesn't say anything about the plans, just a bunch of links to the current products. But my understanding from talking to analysts that you all have briefed that the plan is to migrate Coral8 and Aleri customers to OHIO. Help us avoid speculation and could you clarify?
- Mark
I just don't think a DBA is ready to simply "add CEP" to their application stack. It's not like just deploying a different kind of DBMS. There's a different skill set and quite often a different mentality to the applications. And I think that limits the cross selling opportunities for Sybase. And I'll be honest and say that without major cross selling, I'm not sure how it all fits together.
To make CorAleri a long term success in its current form, I think they would need to develop a whole new class of customers.
But I also hope that they do great things. I think that the CorAleri staff has the potential to lead the way, if Sybase will let them go there.
Come on Mark, not the amnesty program with the ridiculous claims of our customers running to Streambase again. I seem to recall that the last time you pulled this stunt that Marc Adler called you on it, and we didn’t lose a single customer to Streambase.
I found your comment on innovation physics amusing. I’ve now built over 15 innovative products and teams (including a CEP framework at Bell Labs 12+ years ago under Project Sunrise / QTM), so I think I know how to add more resources to an already highly innovative team to improve time to market. The reason Sybase purchased Aleri was to get the technology as well as the team behind it, and to allow us to drive this forward within the depth and breadth that Sybase has to offer. I do agree that the trick will be to still act like a small team, rest assured I’m on top of that. We will continue to push forward with our Ohio plans, but now it will be nice to have other developers who can help us maintain the existing CEP products so many of us (innovators) can focus 100% on Ohio, perhaps that’s where more developers will be a huge help:-)
Please see Jeff’s post to rest assure everyone that our plans have not changed, they’ve just been strengthened. Mark, it's well known and blogged that our plans are to bring the best of ASP and C8 together into one product, codenamed Ohio. We have no intention on showing more detailed plans to our competitors, we reserve that right for our customers, who have received them extremely well. The plan remains the same, in fact we're pretty far down that path already.
Hans thanks for your concern. Fortunately, Sybase HAS asked us to take the lead on this which is why I took on a CEP CTO role at Sybase and why most of my Aleri engineers have joined Sybase as well.
Jerry Baulier | VP - Engineering CTO Office
Sybase
Hi Jerry -
I'm not surprised you don't like it, but customers did switch to StreamBase from Aleri last year, and others are planning it. I got off an analyst call a few hours ago with a third party who personally reported on one defector. I don't take a lot of joy in it, frankly, I'd prefer to have a rising tide lifting all boats.
"Ridiculous claims?" We're both engineers by background, and any engineer knows that merging two products, two code bases, and two engines is tricky stuff. If I was betting my business on a platform that was being reworked, I'd at least look at less risky options.
As for innovation physics, I'm sure you're personally a very innovative guy, but my comment wasn't about you. My point was that many big companies can't innovate, and when a company builds its case by saying they'll hire more people, it's hardly a reflection of a deep understanding of how to create fertile ground for innovation. Again, I hope I'm wrong - I hope for innovation from your group, because CEP is still evolving, and we enjoy the competition. But if you put yourself in your customers' shoes I think you'd feel compelled to wonder about the future.
Like Hans, I'm rooting for you, we'd like nothing more than for Sybase to rise, because that will lift all CEP boats.
- Mark
A couple of years ago, Mark (Palmer) and I agreed about more than a few salient points in CEP land.
Looks like we agree again.
I'm putting it on my calendar...
Colin
Just wanted to clarify that I doubt that Sybase will do very much to market CorAleri as a general tool.
But they may still execute well on a strategy centered around CorAleri. But IMHO, the strategy will probably focus on very specific pre-built functionality like risk and such.
In my mind, there is nothing wrong with that model. But it's different from the previous model of selling general products.
To Jerry Baulier:
Why you put coral8.com offline?
It had quite a lot of interesting pdf documents related to coral8 streaming engine here:
http://www.coral8.com/system/files/assets/pdf/5.6.0/
These documents can not be found anywhere else on Aleri-Sybase sites.
Can I treat it as an evidence that your information policy was changed and you are not so open anymore?
Sorry I didn't respond to santa1024 sooner, but I just saw this. No, you shouldn't read anything into this. Unfortunately we ran into some unexpected technical issues when we closed the Coral8 office and relocated the servers to Sybase HQ. We are working to get coral8.com back online asap. The transition has gone reasonably smooth, but all transitions hit some bumps along the way. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Jerry
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