Today, Sybase announced they have acquired the CEP vendor Aleri. This news comes the week after StreamBase CEP was named as one of the 26 most innovative technologies in the world by the World Economic Forum at Davos.
What does this all mean? The jury will be out for a while, but there’s a lot we can say now about the move, and what the future is likely to hold for Sybase and their CEP strategy:
Sybase's new focus on events is a clear sign of strength of the independent CEP market. The acquisition of Aleri was a strategic one that shows a clear focus on event processing. For that we applaud Sybase! As I wrote in my recent article on predictions for CEP, a new event-based software stack is emerging. Sybase now has an event-oriented database (Sybase IQ) and an event-oriented computing platform (adding Aleri). We welcome a healthier, bigger competitor and relish the competition.
The real CEP stack is best of breed, not Sybase bred. There has been a lot of discussion in the Twitter-sphere about the idea that Sybase + Aleri is a move toward bringing BI and CEP together. Not so. As our CTO Richard Tibbetts (@tibbetts) recently wrote, BI and CEP are different animals. Customers of CEP have all sorts of data warehousing tools, for different purposes. A great CEP platform must work with all of these. For example, at StreamBase, we work with traditional databases (e.g.,
Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, and, yes, Sybase!), specialist databases (e.g.,
Reuter's Vhayu), data warehouses (e.g., Vertica), and traditional BI (e.g.,
SAS). Frankly, the most important of these players are Oracle and Microsoft, not Sybase. So, will customers buy ALL those data warehousing tools from one vendor? Unlikely.
The winning CEP powerhouse will be the one that stays focused. Last month, I predicted that CEP will yield a great new software powerhouse. On their briefing call, Aleri cited the difficulty of selling their software to large firms as a reason they wanted a more economically viable partner in Sybase. This is a poor excuse; confidence is a function of focus, and the quality of the product, people, and finances. StreamBase is private and independent, too, and racked up public blue-chip wins from the CME Group, City Index, RBC, CMC Markets, BNY ConvergEx, and dozens more in 2009. As John Rymer (@johnrrymer) from Forrester tweeted today, "StreamBase has a very strong product and great financial services savvy." A great product and financial services savvy is why StreamBase is becoming the undisputed leader in CEP, beating bigger competitors based on quality.
Sybase has their innovation physics backwards. At Davos I spoke on the topic of innovation, and one truism kept being repeated among the 2,500 business leaders: that big companies can innovate, if they act small. Yet in Sybase's own press release, they reveal their basic misunderstanding of this principle when they say this: "The addition of Sybase development resources to the Aleri platform will accelerate the pace of innovation adding new features to the CEP engine." Innovation doesn't come with "money and resources," it comes from a deep organizational understanding of the art of entrepreneurship, and an ability to execute, for which Sybase is no longer known.
So StreamBase welcomes Sybase as a focused competitor in the CEP space once they integrate the four CEP products they now own. And, until they do, we welcome customers of Aleri, Coral8, and Sybase RAP as they migrate to StreamBase as their platform of choice.
