Aleri News

This article takes a look at Aleri's plans for next-generation CEP.

Agency brokerage and financial technology provider Investment Technology Group is upgrading its global market data infrastructure, and as part of that venture recently rolled out complex event processing vendor Aleri's Market Liquidity Analysis engine to provide a centralized platform for consolidating disparate datafeeds from multiple exchanges, officials say.

While ITG has been able to meet the data needs of its own traders and external clients thus far, the firm expects demand for greater scalability of its market data infrastructure to increase further, and is upgrading its enterprise-wide data infrastructure to meet anticipated capacity, latency and content needs.

Before our discussion, I knew very little about CEP as a field. Morrell and Wootton described CEP as a “means to an end,” and the “end” is Continuous Intelligence. CEP stands in contrast to a data warehouse because CEP is designed to react to real-time conditions, while data warehouses provide a periodic overview of historical information. CEP is useful for detecting changes in trends and new trends and monitoring trends. For example, a government health agency might use CEP to locate flu outbreaks, or a retailer might use CEP to determine when to make a rush order of an item that is suddenly selling more quickly than normal. CEP sifts through the data to extract a trend from the noise and can be used to show both the velocity and the acceleration of a trend.

A new report from Aite Group, based on a survey of 18 smart order routing providers and users (including including brokerage firm providers BNY ConvergEx, Goldman Sachs, Instinet, Knight Direct, BofA Merrill Lynch, SunGard Assent and UBS; CEP providers Aleri, Progress Apama and Streambase and trading technology providers (FlexTrade, Lava, Marketcetera, QUOD Financial, RealTick, smartTrade, SunGard Global Trading and ULLINKas), finds that demand for smart order routing will exceed $1 billion in 2010.