Complex Event Processing

Over the past couple of years, Complex Event Processing has emerged as a hot technology for the financial markets, and its flexibility has been leveraged in applications as diverse as market data cleansing, to algorithmic trading, to compliance monitoring, to risk management. CEP is a solution to many problems, which is one reason why the emerging marketplace is growing, with many vendor options to choose from.

But CEP is not a solution in itself, and so technologists need to concern themselves with how to integrate it within a complete application architecture, how it can best be leveraged, and how to streamline development and deployment. And with multiple vendor choices, choosing the right CEP approach for the job is an important, and early, activity for firms looking to adopt it.

Expect CEP offerings to become more complete in terms of functionality – especially in the event modelling area – and to also exploit technologies that will boost their performance. And expect CEP to become further embedded across the entire trade processing and operations chain. The scenario of CEP becoming an infrastructure component – just like a database or messaging platform is now – is a near certainty. But as for when that will happen is open to debate. The entry into the market by IT heavy hitters like IBM and Oracle – and Microsoft is on its way – will likely drive the infrastructure-level adoption of CEP.

Also expect the CEP marketplace to evolve commercially, as offerings from different vendors become more full function. We’ll see different business models, including cloud delivery, partnerships, acquisitions and mergers. And open source will play a bigger role. As will CEP itself, touching all aspects of the trading enterprise.