Spring has finally sprung, and so has another issue of the "Real-Time with CEP" Newsletter. This issue is filled with something for everyone: business, technical and everything in between. Read Aleri's exciting new announcement about the future direction of the company from Kelly Shumaker. Two Aleri advisory board members contributed an article, including Joe Rosen and Aleri's newest member, Julio Gomez. We also have some great technical articles from Jeff Wootton and our lead architect Jon Riecke, both regular contributors to the new Aleri blog. Finally, Tanya Catalano gives some great insight about the importance of Aleri's partner program. As you enjoy the spring weather, I hope you enjoy this newsletter. If you have any questions or comments, or would even like to contribute, please contact me at Scott.Groenendal@aleri.com. Thanks.

Happy Reading!!

Scott Groenendal - Editor In Chief

Julio Gomez, Founder and President, Gomez Markets

To paraphrase the late Tip O’Neil, all financial services is risk. How long will you live? I’ll insure you. How much do you make? I’ll lend to you. What are the company’s prospects? I’ll buy a piece of you. In these and hundreds of other scenarios across banking, brokerage, and insurance, risk bets are made that define the fortunes and failures of financial institutions. At their core, financial institutions are buyers and sellers of risk.

Suppose you are a systems administrator, and want to respond to potential break-ins quickly. The system continuously produces records of login attempts (perhaps encoded in a log file), and you'd like an alert if there were three unsuccessful attempts to login to an account within five minutes. How do you look for that pattern, especially when most of the attempts are not suspicious? But that's hardly the only example of “pattern matching”.

There seems to be a lot of discussion and debate about the relationship of Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In that context, many people seem to think that SOA is somehow orthogonal to EDA. By extension, then, it raises the question of whether CEP has a role to play in a service oriented architecture. It is more useful, however, to think of EDA as a particular style of SOA, rather than an alternative to SOA.

We’re excited to announce that on April 18, 2008 Wall Street Systems entered into a definitive agreement with Aleri Inc. to acquire Aleri Global Banking (AGB), the wholesale banking division of Aleri Inc. This acquisition derives from Aleri’s decision to exclusively focus on complex event processing (CEP).

As most readers of this publication can attest, the enterprise IT market is one of the most competitive and challenging sales environments in the US economy today. One of the primary reasons is that IT solutions are, by their very nature, part of a network comprised of tens or even hundreds of other vendors’ products. This means that selling an IT solution requires knowledge of, compatibility with, and very often the cooperation of other vendors in your space. For this reason, the sales strategy of all strong IT solution providers requires a robust channel partner component.

Wow! Now it’s really here, the book I have always wanted to do. After all these years, and countless questions asked of many industry wise men/women at countless conferences and seminars– and not least, the year since we started this exciting project – at last The Handbook of Electronic Trading has been published. Fifty notable industry friends and clients from 36 organizations were so giving of both their time and expertise, and so patient – we expected some 12-15 chapters, and ended up with 43, which took much longer than we had anticipated.