Happy New Year!! In our second issue of the Real-Time with CEP Newsletter, we are pleased to welcome Lab49's Daniel Chait. Lab49 is a strategic partner of Aleri's and we are excited to have them contributing a great article on the dos and don'ts of selecting a CEP vendor. In addition to Lab49, several Aleri employees have contributed articles on a variety of topics including CEP and event driven SOA, dark pools of liquidity, and the evolution of queries as the speed of business has increased. I hope you find these articles informative, entertaining and enjoy reading them as much as I did. Should you have any questions about the articles or this newsletter, please contact me at scott.groenendal@aleri.com

Happy Reading!!

Scott Groenendal - Editor In Chief

Don DeLoach, President & CEO, Aleri

I am struck by all the reality TV we have seen ever since "Survivor" came on the scene. What was once a novelty has become the genre of choice. With contestants showcasing their skills and competing around athletic prowess, survival skills, singing, modeling, cooking, dancing, and just about anything else imaginable, I contemplated my reality; what if there was a reality show around CEP vendors?

Over the past few years, the IT community has recognized the benefits of Service-Oriented Architectures, wholeheartedly embracing the move away from monolithic applications and to applications built from systems of loosely coupled services. Now we're on the verge of a new era for SOA, with the integration of Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology.

The CEP market is a relatively new and fast-changing one, with lots of vendors touting similar products. When looking at the field of products and determining which to choose, I have seen many of my customers become confused and bewildered about how to even evaluate the various offerings. Meanwhile, the primary factor most often touted by vendors, journalists, and industry analysts is messages per second (MPS). However, MPS is not the right aspect to focus on.

A query, as any dictionary will tell you, is a question. Traditional databases are designed to answer concrete questions about existing data - that is, they're made to tell us what happened in the past.

Trading 101 - It's the balance of sentiment between buyers and sellers that determines the price (of an instrument) in a market. More buyers, the market goes up, more sellers the market goes down. New market events will determine a new balance point (price) in the market. The market will always trend to a price that brings these opposing views back into balance.

We recently announced the formation of an Aleri Advisory Board comprised of prominent financial market and technology industry thought leaders. While the new group of industry leaders was formed to provide strategic guidance to Aleri as we continue to grow our business and expand into new markets, we were also thinking about how our partners and clients could benefit from their knowledge.