I Will Be At 2008/Web Service Conference in NYC

I will be on a panel at the 2008 Web Services/SOA on Wall Street show on Monday, February 11th.

http://www.lighthouse-partners.com/wsonws/del_speakers.htm

The panel starts at 11:00 AM, and goes for about 45-50 minutes. Topics of interest are the increasing use of blogs, Wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc on Wall Street.

Warning: Since I grew up on the tough streets of Jamaica, Queens, be warned that, if you throw tomatoes at me, you do so at your own risk.

Here is a blurb about the panel:

Beyond Web 2.0...What Enterprise 2.0 Is...And What It Means For Wall Street

Beyond Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is about deploying these new technologies and social practices in a corporate business context.

This session will explore the drivers pushing Enterprise 2.0 adoption, survey relevant technologies, and discuss how Wall Street and the financial markets are benefitting.

Tom Steinthal, Managing Director, Financial Services, BSG Alliance (Moderator)
Marc Adler, Senior Vice President, Equities and Head of Complex Event Processing, Citigroup
Michael Ogrinz, Principal Architect for Global Markets, Bank of America
Jonathan Rochelle, Senior Product Manager, Google
Jason Wood, Head of Research, RT Capital Management and Enterprise IT Blogger


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

KDB Consulting Redux

I have gotten some private emails from people over the past few weeks who have been intrigued about my posts about KDB+, and wanting to know how to be a KDB+ consultant. It may be easier to apply to medical school and become a heart surgeon than it is to bootstrap yourself in a KDB consulting career.

I certainly do not hold myself out as a career counselor. You should not look to me as the key to future riches. All I do is observe the marketplace. I deal alot in hiring people for our own needs, and I get a lot of calls from recruiters. I have a lot of colleagues on Wall Street and in The City. So I am able to gather a lot of different data points, some of which I share on this blog.

Google everything you can about KDB+. Apply to KX Systems for access to the coding areas. Grab a copy of "Q for Mortals" by Jeff Borror. Find the pockets of KDB people in your company and get them to explain their source code for you.

If you have gotten this far....

You will need to get a copy of KDB+, which is not easy to get. Most likely, you cannot go onto LimeWire or Kazaa and find a copy of KDB floating around. Even if you did, you need to find a license key.

You need to go here, and think about how you will convince Niall Dalton or Simon Garland to let you play around with KDB. Or, wait for the next SIFMA conference, find the KDB booth, and offer to take the KDB guys to the lounge at the Hilton. Or, come up with a product that might compliment KDB (like Panopticon did) and try to show Simon that it will increase the popularity of KDB. Maybe an English-to-Q translator? Maybe a true ODBC driver for KDB? Maybe a Q code obsfuscator?

Another avenue is try to approach First Derivatives. They are the primary partner for KX Systems, and the Yin to KX Systems' Yang. Hint .. they love Guiness.

Lest you think that I am picking on KDB ... the same thing can apply to any niche product. I suppose that you would not be able to wake up one day and decide that you will be a Vhayu consultant. In order to specialize in any kind of niche product, you need to leverage the existing resources for that product. This is one of the advantages of being employees of large financial firms or large consulting firms that specialize in financial services.

You need to get yourself into the proper mindset to deal with KDB. It is a very spartan product, hand-tuned and lightning fast at processing real-time flows of tick and order data. The actual Q.exe engine is about a 150K file. You do not get any of the nice, cushy bloat that you have with something like SQL Server and Oracle. Working with KDB brings you back to the days when you were writing DOS TSRs using good old INT 21H (for those of you born after 1980, a TSR is a Terminate and Stay Resident program .... and DOS was an ancient operating system that made Microsoft lots of money).

As if you are not convinced already .... the following code is from a Q file called holiday.q. Once you understand this code, send email to Niall or Simon of KX Systems, or to the people at First Derivatives, and show them that you can write this stuff without even looking (and this is mild ... wait until you get into the juicy stuff).


/day:(day;year)
dy:{"D"$string[y],x}

/residue
r:{y-x*y div x}

/adjust sat/sun
a:{d+0^(x,1)r[7]d:dy[y]z}

/goto dayofweek
b:{d+r[7]x-d:dy[y]z}

/good friday(1900-2099)
g:{d+:e:r[7](6*d:r[30]24+19*a:r[19]x)+5+2*r[4;x]+2*r[7]x;dy["0320";x]+d-7*(d=35)(d=34)&(e=6)&a>10}

/nyse holidays
nyse:(a[2]"0101";b[2]"0115";b[2]"0215";g;b[2]"0525";a[-1]"0704";b[2]"0901";b[5]"1122";a[-1]"1225")

nyse@/:\:2007 2008

©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

.NET Developer Wanted (No Consultants)

A colleague of mine will shortly be looking to hire a great .NET developer as a full-time employee. I am putting out this job req for them, in case you know anyone who is looking to make a switch in the next few weeks. This is a good group to work. The manager is very technical, and gives the developers a chance to play with the latest technology.

Please send all responses and resumes to me, and I will pass it on to him.

.NET Developer

We are seeking highly motivated candidates to create and deliver technology solutions and support for the XXXX business area. The new hire will join a “ground floor” opportunity, working with business clients, offering creative solutions to their needs, and implementing them.

The current technical platform includes C#/.NET, WinForms, ASP.NET, SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Business
Intelligence (Integration, Reporting, & Analysis Services), SharePoint, and Visual C++. A “Road Map” outlining a series of potential projects has recently been presented to senior business clients and has been well-received – the door is wide open for Technology to create the IT Work Slate for 2008, deliver on these commitments, and make a large positive impact on the XXXXX business’ bottom line revenue.

Job Responsibilities include:

• Key development on critical .NET-based projects


• Working on all aspects of these projects, including front end work in WinForms and ASP.NET as well as backend database work in SQL Server 2005


• Support and minor enhancements of the existing Visual C++ application until the new product is fully launched


• Balancing fast time to market (client delivery) with proper Governance, Compliance, and Audit mandates


• Fostering close relationships with other teams in XXXX Technology and throughout the Technology organization

Required Skills:

• Strong C#/.NET development skills


• Experience with data-driven .NET projects


• Comfortable with data binding techniques in ASP.Net


• Comfortable with data binding techniques in WinForms


• Experience or interest in Agile development (Scrum, XP, etc)


• Strong team player, collaborative


• Persistence - ability to get things done


• Worked in an investment banking environment

Preferred Skills:

• MS SQL Server 2005


• Familiarity with Visual C++ a plus


• Interest and ability to work with new technologies - Powershell, WPF*, WCF

Colin Clark is with Streambase - Where's my Finder's Fee?

A few week ago, this blog mentioned the news that Colin disbanded Kaskad, and was looking for new opportunities. I also proposed that Streambase hire Colin and some of his gang, as they were all in the Boston area together.

Lo and behold, Colin is now with Streambase.

An example of the wonders of the blogging network in action!

Also interesting that Bill Harts is on the Streambase Advisory Board. When I was consulting with Goldman in the late 1980's, I was friendly with Bill, as our groups interacted. I actually interviewed with Bill and Mike Dubnow for a job in Fischer Black's group, but mercifully, they spared me the pain of having to try to understand the world of the Quants (leaving me the opportunity to go full-time into Magma Systems after I left Goldman). Emmanuel Derman has written extensively about the goings-on in Black's little world.

Mike Dubnow eventually became the first Managing Director from the tech side at Goldman, and has since retired. I think that Mike was one of the creators of the SLANG language at Goldman.

On Wall Street, we have an incestuous little circle.

IDE for KDB+ Development

QKDT

Eclipse plugins for Q development

©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

When will they ever learn?

http://apama.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/the-power-of-th.html


Sigh .... When will the guys at Streambase learn that dubious marketing may overshadow what seems to be a really good product .....


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

NYSE Buys Wombat

A friend of mine at one of the NYSE-owned companies jokingly warned me last week that, today, there would be an announcement that would knock my socks off.

I wasn't prepared for the onslaught of emails that I started receiving around 9:00 AM, announcing the acquisition of Wombat by the NYSE. The guys from Wombat, who sit in the next row from me on the trading floor, gave me a look like "What? Who me?", while secretly counting their new-found riches under the table.

My only concern about this deal is a possible conflict-of-interest that might arise when a supposedly "exchange-neutral" information provider gets bought out by one of the exchanges that it is supposed to deal with. Conspiracy theorists might have a field day when there seems to be abnormal latency with a non-NYE exchange.

As far as CEP goes, my thought is .... would Coral8 be on the acquisition block next, seeing how closely they cooperate with Wombat and seeing how Reuters is aligning themselves with Streambase?

©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Erin Erring

Who let Erin Burnett out of the cage to write this article?

Liz Claman was always my favorite CNBC anchor. Sorbonne graduate. Fluent in French. Flaming red hair. Unfortunately, Liz made the jump over to the Fox Business Channel, which I will refuse to watch unless they have Peter Griffin delivering the financial reports.

You would think that CNBC would have learned its lessons after the hubbub over Maria Bartiromo. They should stick with the really solid reporters who have financial domain knowledge, such as Joe Kernan and David Faber. Let's also get Emmanuel Derman in there as a reporter.


©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

CEP and SOA

There has been a lot of activity in the CEP blogs about the uses of that mythical beast, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This beast means different things to different people. From my standpoint, let me tell you what it means to me, and let me tell you what I need.

For my company, the possible adoption of CEP will mean a huge seed-change in the way that we develop applications and share information. Right now, we have the most important information in the trading and risk process going directly into huge, monolithic Gui's. Important order and risk information is being sucked into a GUI application, much like a vacuum cleaner sucks up a trail of dust.

Already, the CEP effort has been able to transform the order-monitoring GUI into an Order Service, publishing order information to subscribers over a message bus. If the CEP project is a total bust, then at least the one tangible is the liberation of order flow information.

As all of the important data --- orders, risk, positions --- gets published out by the source systems and gets consumed by other applications, we need to have a global catalog that developers can browse where they can find out how to access data and what operations can be performed on the data.

For example, if I needed to get a real-time flow of Greeks for certain vanilla US equity derivatives, I might use the catalog to ask a question like this:

"Where can I find real time flows of greeks for IBM, INTC, MSFT, and DELL options? I prefer to have this flow come through as XML, but if no XML is available, then give the data to me in any format. In addition, I need to know if you have a remote function that I can call that calculates theta on a certain security."

The catalog service might respond:

"You can get the US Equity Deriv Greek flows by subscribing to a Tibco EMS message bus. You need to subscribe to the Tibco broker at tcp://megacorpbroker:7001, using functional ID "foo" and password "baz". This service is publishing out each greek as a JMS MessageMap on the EMS topic equities.derivatives.greeks.us, and here is a list of properties that you can access in each message. Sorry, but we don't support XML.

Furthermore, here are a list of request/response operations that the Greeks Web Service supports. If you want to generate the proxy code to use these operations, the URL of the WSDL for the Greeks Web Service is at http://greekserver:8042/webservice.wsdl.

As an added bonus, if you send this XML string as a JMS TextMessage in the following format to this the EMS queue named equities.derivatives.greeks.services, then you will get a response on your private EMS temporary queue."

This is like a super-charged UDDI, but knows about things like message buses and JMS queues and topics. For me, this is what we need out of SOA. Everyone publishing and consuming real-time flows. Everyone making services available, both as Web Services and as request/responses over a message bus.

The catalog should be real-time itself. In other words, if a new flow or a new service becomes available, the catalog itself should notify listeners that something has changed. So, all applications might subscribe to a "catalog control" topic where real-time changes to the catalog services are broadcast.

Imagine now that we have a GUI in which users can pick and choose from various flows, dynamically create queries that will be registered with the CEP engine, and dynamically define derived events that will be created when the queries detect a situation. Most of the CEP engines support an API which makes this possible.

Should we write this SOA catalog ourselves? Can you recommend a product that already does this?


©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

I Hate Vista

Slow, cumbersome, intrusive.

Nuff said....


©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Kudos to Streambase Support

Thanks to Steve Barber and some of the other members of the Streambase tech support team. I could not get an out-of-process, .NET-based adapter to communicate with the Streambase engine on my laptop, although it worked fine on my office machine.

The Streambase people worked during the slow holiday season to diagnose the problem. It was caused by a DLL called BMNET.DLL that was installed by my Cingular/ATT Communications Manager. I have a Cingular broadband card that I use to connect to the internet when I am on the road and don't have a free wireless connection to tap into. BMNET.DLL provides data acceleration to the Internet.

Microsoft references this problem here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910435



©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Aleri Evaluation

Just a small word about the Aleri evaluation. Several of you have repeatedly pinged me to find out what I thought of Aleri, so I am going to write down some of my impressions. The usual disclaimers apply, such as this is my opinion and does not necessarily represent the opinions of my employer.

My impressions were formed after a superficial evaluation of Aleri against some of the other vendors. I have not gotten to the point yet where I am testing the latency and throughput of the CEP engines. I have not soaked and stressed the CEP engines to see if any of them are leaking memory. I have not tried them on a variety of processors, and I have not examined their performance under multicore processors.

In a nutshell, my biggest area of concern with Aleri was the "spit-and-polish" of the product. They very well might have the fastest CEP engine out there. However, I was stymied by the quality of the documentation, and my perceptions of their Aleri Studio. It also seemed that they were more of a "system integrator" that some of the other CEP firms, taking separate products like OpenAdaptor and JPivot and trying to fit them into a holistic offering.

An example of this was reflected in the difficult time I had in getting Aleri integrated with SQL Server 2005 through Open Adaptor. The documentation was non-obvious, and it took many hours with their sales engineer to finally get it connected. I compare this to Streambase and Coral8, where it took all of 5 minutes to hook up an SQL Server 2005 database to their systems (disclaimer: there is a problem getting Streambase, Vista and SQL Server to work together, although Streambase has not yet released an official version for Vista).

That being said, the salient points are:

1) Aleri's management team (Don DeLoach and Jeff Wootton) fully realize their short-comings in the department of aesthetics, and have promised me that they are actively addressing it. I would highly recommend that Aleri look at Streambase, whose total package is good with regards to documentation and tutorials. (However, I still find a lot of pockets of geekiness in the Streambase documentation.)

2) The Aleri sales engineering team, led by Dave, got a variant of my initial use case to work. However, there are features that Aleri does not yet have, such as jumping windows and pattern matching, that make Coral8 and Streambase stand out.

3) Going through Open Adaptor is not fun. Streambase and Coral8 make it simple to write adapters in C#. The Aleri sales engineer told me that he usually has to help clients to get adapters to work. That is really not the message that a company wants to hear if they have many legacy systems to interface with.

4) Aleri has real-time OLAP, using JPivot. To my knowledge, they are the only CEP company to offer real-time OLAP. I did not really get to see this feature, but true real-time OLAP is something that a lot of financial companies are interested in. We want to be able to slice and dice our order flow in real time over different dimensions.

5) The Aleri Studio uses Eclipse, just like Streambase, and the icons even look exactly like Streambase's icons. However, the user interaction seemed a bit shaky at times, and there were moments when I got myself into "trouble" with the Aleri Studio by clicking on one thing before clicking on another thing. Again, Streambase seems more solid. And, Coral8 does not try to impose a GUI builder on the developer. The guys at Aleri told me that they are addressing these issues.

I was really pulling for Aleri, since the development center is about 15 minutes from my house in New Jersey. They are right down the block from the hallowed halls of Bell Labs in Mountainside, and some of the developers live in the next town over from me. You couldn't meet a company of nicer guys, and the CEO is a very low-key guy compared to other CEOs that I have met. I was impressed by the fact that, at the Gartner conference on CEP, he stood up in front of the audience and exhorted us to try different CEP products.

I anxiously look forward to the 3.0 version of Aleri's offerings, and to see tighter, easier integration between their various components, enhanced documentation, enhanced support for .NET, and a cleaner version of their Aleri Studio. Given the quality of the developers there, I am sure that this version will kick some butt.



©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Where are the CEP Customers?

It seems that, lately, every blog posting I make on CEP generates further blog postings from the vendors and the subject-matter experts in the CEP space. It's great to see the CEP blogs become more active, so that I can tap into the collective wisdom of people like Tim, Marco, Mark, etc.

However, where are the postings from other customers? Isn't there someone from Goldman, Lehman, Merrill, etc who wonder about the same things that I do? Or, do these people mainly purchase the pre-packaged algo trading packages that the vendors have to offer.

One thing that was very interesting was the copy of the Aite Group report on Complex Event Processing that somebody had forwarded to me. It seems that most of the CEP companies number their customers in the dozens, rather than the hundreds or thousands. It seems that we are either at the very beginning of the explosive group that Aite predicts, or not many companies are finding a use for CEP, relying instead on their legacy apps to deal with streaming events. Certainly, in my own company, we have hand-written code for the various algo and HFT trading systems, code that I am sure the developers have profiled the hell out of in order to get the max performance. We would be hard pressed to replace this code with a generic CEP system.

If you are a customer or potential customer of CEP, I offer the opportunity to send me private comments at magmasystems at yahoo.





©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Visualizations Update

Stephen Few is rapidly positioning himself as the guru of business visualizations. His name has been brought to my attention several times over the past few weeks as someone to pay attention to .... "a new Edward Tufte", if you will.

Few has an online library with a lot of free articles to read. Right now, I'm reading Multivariate Analysis using Heatmaps. This is especially worthwhile reading following last week's visit by Richard and Markus of Panopticon, who showed more reasons why we should graduate from the free Microsoft heatmap control to the more feature-laden, doubleplusunfree, Panopticon product. As Panopticon adds more features in the value chain, it will be increasingly difficult to justify using a free product.

------------------------------------

Which brings me to another point that I have been thinking of ... a point that I raised on my previous blog posting. In the field of Enterprise Software, where do the responsibilities of a vendor begin and where do they end?

Take Panopticon, for instance. You can bind a streaming "dataset" to Panopticon, and Panopticon will render a realtime updating Heatmap to visualize that dataset. Of course, you ask how you get data into Panopticon, and you come back with the concept of input adapters.

Then, gradually, you wonder if their input adapters cover KDB, Wombat, Reuters, Vhayu, OpenTick, generic JMS, sockets, etc.

Then you wonder if Panopticon has input adapters that take the output of CEP engines, like Coral8 and Streambase. Or, you have a crazy thought like Panopticon embedding a copy of Esper/NEsper inside of itself.

Then, you get really greedy and wonder if Panopticon provides built-in FIX adapters that will devour a FIX 4.4 stream of orders and executions and show you what exchanges are slow today.

Then you wonder what kinds of analytical tools Panopticon might interface with ... since Panopticon is doing parsing and analysis of the streaming data anyway, can't it just take an extra step and analyze the silly data.

But, then if you are demanding all of these things of Panopticon and Coral8, how do you hook them together? Does the dog wag the tail or does the tail wag the dog?

Or, do we just consider Panopticon a simple visualization tool, demanding nothing more of it then the ability to display brightly colored rectangles of streaming data, and likewise, do we ask nothing more of Coral8 than to do what it does best ... recognize patterns and perform filtering and aggregations.

As Dali-esque as these thoughts may appear, this is the kind of things that I need to consider. In my quest for an ecosystem around the CEP engine, do we ask for the CEP engine vendors to expand outwards, or do we take the outer layer of components (ie: the visualization and analysis tools) and ask them to expand inwards to meet the CEP engine. Whatever it is, my wish would be for a true plug-and-play architecture between the CEP engine, its input components, and its output components.



©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

CEP Vendors and the Ecosystem

While my wife and son cavort around Australia and New Zealand for the next few weeks (I get to stay home and watch my daughter, who only has one week off from high school), I hope to be able to catch up on some of the blog posts that I owe people.

One of the things that is most important for me in choosing a CEP vendor is the ecosystem that surrounds the CEP engine. In a company such as mine, we need to interface with many different legacy systems. These legacy systems can hold crucial data, such as historical orders, customer trades, market data, volatility curves, customer and security reference data, etc. This data may reside statically in a database, be published out as flow over some kind of middleware, or interfaced with an object cache or data fabric. We have every color and shape of database technology in our firm, whether it be more traditional relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase, or newer tick databases like KDB+.

From the input and output points of the CEP engine, we need seamless integration with all sorts of systems. Most CEP engines have the concept of in-process and out-of-process adapters. In-process adapters are more performant that out-of-process adapters. We would love to see as many in-process adapters delivered out-of-the-box by our CEP vendor. We do not want to spend time writing our own in-process adapters.

So far, none of the CEP vendors support KDB+ as an out-of-the-box solution. In fact, many of the CEP vendors did not even know what KDB+ was. (Is the same true for Vhayu as well?) My feeling is that, if a CEP vendor is going to be successful on Wall Street, then they must support KDB+. Is it even feasible for the CEP vendors to provide an abstraction layer around KDB+, and let the CEP developer write all queries in SQL instead of writing them in K or Q?

One of the most important things that I would like to see from the CEP vendors are tools to enable the analysis of all of the data that pass through the CEP engine. Many groups might not have the budget to hire a specialized mathematician or quant to perform time-series analysis on the data. Learning specialized languages like R or SPlus might not be possible for smaller groups that do not have a mathematical bent. The same goes for packages like Mathematica and Matlab.

Would it be worth it for the CEP vendors to come out with a pre-packaged "stack" for various financial verticals that incorporates analysis tools? Or, would writing a detailed cookbook be better? And, where does the responsibility of the CEP vendor end? Should we expect the CEP vendor to provide a one-stop shop for all of our needs, or should be just expect the CEP vendors to provide strong integration points?

Better yet, does this open up an opportunity for a third party company to provide this service? Like the many laptop vendors who buy a motherboard (the CEP engine), and slap together a disk drive, CD drive, screen and keyboard to make a complete system?

In examining the various CEP vendors, I have come to the conclusion that the offerings from Streambase, Coral8 and Aleri are very similar. Given another year, I might expect each vendor to fill in the gaps with regards to their competitors' offerings, and at that point, we might have practically identical technologies from 3 different vendors. In my opinion, the real win for these CEP vendors will come in the analysis tools they provide.


©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

At Eaton Airport, October 2007

My shirt is hanging out of my fleece, but nevertheless, the foliage was beautiful at Eaton Airport in Norwich, New York. My Mooney M20G is right behind me.

©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Blog Momentum

On December 18th, I looked at my ClustrMap and saw that I had 239 visitors on the previous day. While this is nothing compared to the big blogs out there, it is definitely an improvement from the 30-40 per day that I had last year. I am not sure if my involvement with CEP has anything to do with it, or if it is becoming more well known across the Wall Street community (I believe it's the latter).

The levels of comments have increased too. Also, the number of private emails that I get have also increased, as a lot of you share your opinions about working on Wall Street, evals of CEP vendors, etc.

Some of you wonder if I can get into trouble with my company for the blog. Let me tell you that there are a HUGE number of people from my company who read my blog, not only from the tech side, but from the business side as well. The former CTO of our company was a big blog reader of mine. The CIO of our company has his own internal blog, and I know that people have recommended my blog to him.

Take a look at what other big financial companies are doing with blogs and wikis. Enlightened management at financial institutions will embrace social networking and a more open community, not run scared at the thoughts of what a competitor might pick up from a blog. Wall Street and The City are very close-knit communities, and more information passes between the employees at Lehman and Goldman during Happy Hour than whatever can be revealed from a blog.


©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Bonus Season

Word is trickling across the Street about Goldman's bonuses. Everyone knows the numbers of an average bonus of over $600,000 per employee. But the whispers that I have heard from a number of people are that the IT employees below Managing Director level did not fare very well.

In conversations that I have had with a number of current and ex colleagues, we are speculating whether most Wall Street companies will turn off the bonus spout, and admonish employees to "Just try to go anywhere else! Nobody is hiring now!".

What will be the likely scenario is a 10% reduction across the board of the lowest performers. I am going long in the steak-knife manufacturers.

What you don't want to see is the de-motivation of the normal, punch-the-clock worker in the IT field. These are the people who score in the middle of the road on their yearly evaluations, the people who have been at a company long enough to know one system inside and out, the people who don't blog nor read blogs, the people who don't work on weekends and who don't think about the next great product that they want to write for the traders. These are the people that usually hold the keys to the systems and the data, the people who you need to convince to open the gates to your applications. Giving these people the doughnut bonus will slow down processes, resulting in further roadblocks for the people who do want to get things done.

Nevertheless, I still have open headcount for the CEP project and for the .NET client framework team.

©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Farewell Kaskad

A player in the CEP space, Kaskad, is no more. Colin Clark writes in to say that, since the Boston Stock Exchange (BSX) has ceased to function, Colin had to disband Kaskad. I assume that since Kaskad did the work for the BSX as consultants, the BSX maintained all or most of the IP rights. Or, perhaps, Kaskad felt that since their only client was no longer funding their development, they could not gain further VC money in this financial environment.

According to the Aite report on CEP vendors, Kaskad had 16 employees. Since they are based up in Boston, I wonder if Streambase is looking at adding some additional talent.

Colin is looking for new opportunities in the CEP space, so contact him if you have anything that might interest him. Colin was involved in the old NEON (New Era for Networks) back in the dotcom boom, so he has the entrepreneural streak running through him.

©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

Streambase (yet again ...)

After vowing to bypass Streambase in my CEP engine evaluation, I may be forced to eat crow. I agreed to let Streambase into the evaluation process because I need to have two CEP engines in my project ... one as primary and one as "cold backup". And, for various reasons, Aleri and Esper did not pan out for me.

The new CEO of Streambase, Chris Ridley, came down to New York to meet with me, with his chief architect, Richard Tibbetts, in tow. They acknowledged some of the errors of their over-aggressive marketing, and told me about their sharpened focus on the financial industry marketplace.

They also let me have an eval version of Streambase that is not constrained by any license key, and in the interests of expediency, they graciously allowed me to bypass their eval agreement (which would have taken weeks to make it through my company's legal processes at this time of the year).

I installed Streambase on my laptop. My first impressions are ..... "slick". In other words, all the superficial, glossy stuff that gives the initial impression to a prospective customer is all there. Nice documentation with plenty of graphics, a great interactive tutorial, etc. I was "warned" that Streambase puts a lot of time into their studio and help system, and I can definitely concur. Nice job, guys.

I am going through the tutorials now. Several things jump out at me right away:

1) They use Eclipse as the foundation of their Streambase Studio. I am quickly becoming a fan of Eclipse, especially the way that you can automatically update Eclipse plugins.

2) The development methodology is more "file-based" than the other products. A familiar paradigm to Java/C# developers.

3) There are two ways to develop apps. The Event Flow method uses a GUI-based method. You can also program in StreamSQL. Unfortunately, there is no tie-in between the Event Flow and the Stream SQL files. In other words, unlike Coral8, if you make a change in the Event Flow, it does not get reflected in the StreamSQL file. In your project, you can have multiple Event Flow files and multiple StreamSQL files. I would love to be able to develop in either system, and have them automatically translated to the other system.

4) There are certain things that you need to do in the Event Flow system that you cannot do in StreamSQL. There are comments in their demo programs to this effect. I would welcome a document that outlined these differences.

5) I noticed that the icons used in the tool palette are identical to the ones that Aleri uses. Interesting. Someone looked at the other company's product.

6) Richard Tibbetts and Mark Tzimelson are very respectful to each other's work. Nice to see that kind of respect at the technical level.


©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved