Welcome to episode eight of The Complex Events Podcast brought to you by Voices in Business and sponsored by Oracle.

On today’s show, we feature an interview with Sumitro Sarkar of ThomsonReuters.  

Sumitro Sarkar is Global Head of Business Architecture at ThomsonReuters. He has more than 20 years of experience in management consulting, with a focus on strategy and transformation. Currently, he works at ThomsonReuters office of the CTO on market data and associated areas.

He also writes the “Is IT Worth It” blog and also blogs at the CIOZone.

In this interview, Sumitro speaks with Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business and David Fergie of Oracle about his thoughts on CEP as a disruptive technology, its applicability across industries, and the steps necessary for adoption.

Show notes for this episode:

00:13 - Introduction
00:52 – Start of interview and Sumitro’s background
01:57 – Is CEP analogous to Financial Services
02:27 – Low Latency and High Latency Businesses
02:55 – Healthcare, Insurance and Decision Support
03:34 – Gaming industry, Interactivity and Simultaneity
05:14 – Parallel Processing versus Rules-Based Engines
06:02 – A disruptive technology
06:42 – Modeling the real world
07:08 – Align businss and technology
08:00 – Adopting CEP
09:46 – Multi-Data Centric to Adaptive
12:06 – Non-intrusive applications
14:44 – Real-Time processing “On the Chip”
15:47 – Proactive risk mitigation
16:33 – Measuring systemic and market risk
16:54 – Alan Greenspan and determining magnitude of risk
18:41 – Practical usage of CEP and social networking
22:02 – End of interview and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on +44 20 7193 1295, or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

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On today’s show, we bring you the second part of our interview with Professor David Luckham of Stanford University as he shares his thoughts on the future of CEP with Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business and David Fergie of BEA Systems.

David discusses how we now live in an event driven world and that CEP will work across industries. He explores how the information flowing through all of the layers of the enterprise IT infrastructure will utilise CEP to be discovered, understood in terms of its impact on high level management goals and business processes, and acted upon in real-time.

Show notes for this episode:

00:14 Introduction
00:42 David’s predictions for the coming 18 months
03:58  Long-term outlook for CEP, building enterprise communication systems, a technology in an event driven world
05:19 Airtraffic control, an example of event driven enterprise need for real-time comprehensive event processing and business intelligence
07:17 Worldwide epidemiology forecasting, long-term environmental forecasting, climate monitoring and simulation, long-term effects of human activity
08:25 CEP and information driven technologies
10:48  Protecting information privacy, “monitor the data monitoring”
13:23 End-users building on vendor CEP engines
15:59 Interview conclusion and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on  +44 (0) 20 7193 1295, or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

Links:

- David Luckham’s Complex Events Processing website
- The Event Processing Technical Society 

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Welcome to episode six of The Complex Events Podcast brought to you by Voices in Business and sponsored by BEA Systems.

On today’s show, we feature an interview with David Luckham, Research Professor of Electrical Engineering (Emeritus) at Stanford University.

Professor Luckham is often referred to as “the Father of CEP”. He has held faculty and invited faculty positions in both mathematics and computer science at eight major universities in Europe and the United States, led the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, and was one of the founders of Rational Software, Inc. In his latest book “The Power of Events”, he provides an introduction to complex event processing

David’s website www.complexevents.com provides a forum for cross-industry applications and products that employ any form of CEP, as well as the latest research and developments in event processing

In this, the first part of a two-part interview, David shares his thoughts on CEP and how it compares and works with SOA and business oriented architecture as he speaks with Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business and David Fergie, Principal Architect at BEA Systems.

Show notes for this episode:

00:13 - Introduction
00:46 - Beginning of interview
01:01 - David Luckham’s background
02:14 - CEP versus Event-Driven SOA
07:23 - Adoption of CEP, avoiding pitfalls and “boil the ocean” projects
11:12 - CEP mega-product suite combining discrete event simulation, computer networks, active databases and middleware
14:04 - The difference of CEP versus the individual processes
16:46 - Applying CEP to challenges: information risk, e.g., spyware; employee permissions; accouting process complying with government regulations; detecting opportunities for arbitrage in trading; servicing customers requests in call centers.
18:54 - End of part 1 and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on +44 (0) 20 7193 1295, or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

Links:

- David Luckham’s Complex Events Processing website
- The Event Processing Technical Society 

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In this, the third and final installment of our interview with Brad Bailey of Aite Group, Brad shares his thoughts on millisecond trading, scalability, ‘CEP enabled business intelligence,’ and querying streaming data to provide real time risk analytics and business intelligence that extends from the front through to the back office.

Brad is speaking with Ross Hamilton and Daniel Chait of Lab49 and Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business.

Show notes for this episode:

00:14 - Introduction
00:49 - Scalability - Abstracting business logic from the infrastructure
02:19 - Difference between CEP and BAM applications
03:28 - CEP-enabled business intelligence and the ability to query real–time streaming data  
05:06 - Convergence of CEP vendors with distributed cache and messaging
06:27 - Real-time capital markets infrastructure
07:45 - Business and technology trends over the next 12 to 24 months
08:03 - CEP-based risk management
09:27 - CEP as an Enterprise system
10:48 - Deterministic testing, simulation and regression
13:55 - Incorporating CEP at large financial institutions
18:28 - End of interview and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on +44 (0) 20 7193 1295, or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

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On today’s show, we bring you the second part of our interview with Brad Bailey of Aite Group. Ross Hamilton and Daniel Chait of Lab49 speak with Brad about the challenges facing capital markets firms and how CEP provides an opportunity to manage these market challenges in new ways.

Show notes for this episode:

00:12 - Introduction
00:48 - Ross picks up the conversation from Part 1 (CEP03)
01:26 - The perfect storm of 2007: electronification of markets, Reg NMS, and volatility
02:08 - Millisecond trading
02:43 - Innovation in financial instruments: OTC to high-speed electronically-traded
03:38 - Virtual order book
04:15 - Use cases: real-time risk analytics, electronic trading, market data
05:09 - Liquidity sourcing: ECNs, BATS, Arca
06:10 - Fraud detection and compliance
07:40 - Pre-trade analytics
08:42 - Pattern recognition and pattern matching
10:45 - CEP platform variations
13:21 - “Messages per second” and mission-critical deployment
15:55 - Resource benefit and vendor solutions
16:34 - End of part 2 of the interview and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on +44 (0) 20 7193 1295, or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

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Welcome to episode three of The Complex Events Podcast brought to you by Voices in Business and sponsored by BEA Systems.

On today’s show, Brad Bailey, Research Analyst with Aite Group joins Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business and Ross Hamilton and Daniel Chait of Lab49 to discuss recent trends in complex events processing.

Brad shares his thoughts on the trends that occurred during 2007, where early adopters used the emerging technology of CEP as a solution for strategy and algorithmic trading.

Moving into 2008, Brad believes that a sea change will occur, where the application of CEP will widen to include the management of the overwhelming amounts of data flowing into the market from the dual forces of ever increasing algorithmic trading volumes and the new regulatory regime requirements of Regulation NMS in the U.S. and MIFID in Europe.

This is part one of a three-part interview.

About Aite Group:
Aite Group is a leading independent research and advisory firm focused on business, technology and regulatory issues and their impact on the financial services industry.

Show notes for this episode:

00:13 - Introduction
01:20 - Background on Lab49
02:04 - Background on Brad and the Aite Group
03:05 - General trends with respect to CEP and Capital Markets
04:08 - Innovation driven by the buy-side?
05:03 - How many market participants are actually implementing CEP?
07:14 - How adaptive are algorithms to changing market conditions?
08:03 - The evolution of vendors and suppliers
09:36 - CEP adoption across the enterprise
12:25 - Regulatory issues such as Best Execution
13:44 - The dynamic between innovation and risk/control
15:04 - How mature are these CEP products offered by vendors?
17:57 - End of part one of the interview and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on +44 (0) 20 7193 1295, or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

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On today’s show, Daniel Chait, Managing Director, and Ross Hamilton, Director of Client Engagements at Lab49, continue their conversation with Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business about the evolution of Complex Event Processing.

In this part of the discussion, Daniel and Ross cover the adoption of Complex Event Processing, how buy-side demands drove its use to solve the needs for algorithmic trading in 2006 and 2007, and what they expect will be broad-based adoption across the enterprise in 2008, particularly in the areas of market data, real time pricing, fixed income and enterprise wide credit risk management.

Show notes for this episode:

00:13 - Introduction
00:46 - Adoption and development of CEP technology 
03:22 - Use cases (market data at low latency, pre-trade analytics, risk)
06:17 - Market data volume management
09:46 - Correlation, trend analysis and other pattern recognition
10:54 - Complex derivatives
14:58 - Managing enterprise-wide credit risk
16:47 - Buy-side versus sell-side adoption
21:07 - End of interview and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on +44 20 7193 1295 or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

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Welcome to the first episode of The Complex Events Podcast, brought to you by Voices in Business and sponsored by BEA Systems.

In this inaugural episode of the series, Daniel Chait, Managing Director, and Ross Hamilton, Director of Client Engagements at Lab49, converse with Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business about the market forces driving the evolution of Complex Event Processing.

Exploring the architectural changes that have taken place, from batch processing to event-driven, Ross and Daniel discuss the ever-increasing demands on IT infrastructure coming from increasingly complex products, from trading strategies requiring low-latency and from the management of high volumes of data.

They predict that 2008 will be the year that CEP moves from algorithmic trading desks to broad-based adoption across products, trading strategies and enterprise-wide requirements, in both buy-side and sell-side financial institutions.

This is the first part of a two-part interview. The second half will appear as the next episode of this series (due for release in mid-February 2008).

Ross and Daniel will feature regularly as co-hosts on upcoming shows, interviewing a variety of thought leaders with expertise in the field of CEP.

Lab49 specialize in building advanced applications for major financial institutions, and have developed a particular expertise in event driven processes.     

Show notes for this episode:

00:14 - Introduction
01:04 - Start of interview
01:25 - Ross, Daniel and Lab 49s background
03:48 - Architectural changes and real-time visibility of positions
08:48 - Direct market access
10:00 - Development of standards and open source
11:18 - Implementing event driven architecture
12:51 - CEP solutions
15:53 - High performance computing
16:33 - Performance under real world conditions
18:41 - Time to market
20:14 - Other performance issues, beyond “messages per second”
21:41 - End of part one of the interview and wrap-up

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

We welcome all feedback, so please leave a comment here on the website, call us to leave an audio comment on +44 (0) 7193 1295 or send a message to comments@voicesinbusiness.com

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The Case for Complex Event Processing

As capital markets continue to be fueled by innovations in technology and the new business opportunities they present, market participants find themselves in a new type of arms race.

Not only do they need to respond to market activity with low latency but they need to be able to handle massive volumes of data, understand the complexities of new financial instruments and find new ways to make money.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is the latest evolution in the technology domain that is enabling companies to handle their IT infrastructure and support business needs alike.

This series of podcasts will cover the trends in the marketplace, the challenges and opportunities facing market participants and the applications of technologies relating to CEP platforms.
 
1.       Market and Technology Trends in Capital Markets; moving from batch processing to event-driven architectures; integration of grid computing with dynamic business functionality; transparency and liquidity across the marketplace

2.       Use cases for Complex Event Processing in financial applications, including: Real-time processing (normalization, cleansing, enrichment) of vast quantities of market data; correlation analysis for algorithmic trading opportunities; low-latency order routing and execution; real-time pricing & risk management; fraud and compliance applications; service Level monitoring

3.       Challenges in using CEP technologies, and how to decide on a platform: What is needed to make CEP engines work in the enterprise ? What features should be considered in selecting a CEP platform ? What is coming down the road in the next 6-18months ?

4.       Building flexible, high performance applications: What are the core components in the next generation trading room architecture and how do the integrate with one another ? Where does really CEP fit into the high throughout, low latency picture – is CEP the solution to every problem ? How do you scale an application while retaining flexibility and responsiveness to changing business needs ?

5.       Data visualization and control of automated trading businesses: How do you control a fully automated trading environment ? What architectural and application controls are needed ? How do you deploy new or modified business logic ? How do you visualize the vast and complex data sets in real-time ?