Big news today, with the announcement that Sybase has acquired Aleri’s products and customers. There’s been speculation that this would be the year of consolidation for CEP and that’s already proving true. I have now joined Sybase, along with most of my Aleri colleagues, and I’m looking forward to the things we will be able to accomplish as part of the Sybase family.

Some people are asking how this will affect Aleri customers. I'm confident in saying they will receive this as good news. Probably the most significant impact is that Sybase will be investing much more in developing and rapidly evolving CEP than Aleri could afford to do as a stand-alone company. By combining the Aleri CEP engineering team with the Sybase CEP engineering team we can really make some great things happen.

There's also the opportunity to leverage the wider Sybase product set. After all, CEP never gets deployed by itself – it’s always used in conjunction with other technology, from messaging middleware to databases, etc. We saw this in Aleri and took a step in that direction with the addition of live OLAP capabilities to CEP. This continues us on that path, by allowing us to offer CEP in conjunction with a broader technology suite, starting with the Sybase RAP platform. In the world of open systems, we will continue to offer integration will the various systems that our customers use of course, but the ability to offer CEP as part of a broader analytic suite will be very compelling.

As for the future, many of you know that “project Ohio” was underway at Aleri, to combine the best features of both the Aleri and Coral8 CEP engines into a single best-in-class product. That is still our plan, and Sybase will continue to sell and support the Aleri CEP platform alongside Sybase CEP/Coral8 while we work to achieve that goal. Needless to say, we will provide a migration path for all customers when we come out with new releases of the products.

Stay tuned for great things to come.

Jeff