SunGard and StreamBase have partnered to bring complex event processing (CEP) powered trading solutions to the Japanese market. As Inside Market Data reports (subscription required), SunGard will enable clients to build systems based on the StreamBase technology, integrated with SunGard's exchange gateways, which firms can use to connect to market data and route orders to exchanges.
Charles-Henry Choel, global head of trading and client connectivity for SunGard’s global trading business, said this: “Our local customers in Japan, and across Asia, have a strong desire to improve their speed to market, now that many exchanges in the region have upgraded their trading systems to allow high frequency trading. StreamBase’s CEP platform will help SunGard’s customers extend their front-office solutions with high-frequency trading functionality, such as intraday risk management and customizable algorithms, in an integrated environment. SunGard’s customers in Japan will therefore be able to trade in high frequency with an optimized environment.”
Speed -- low latency -- is an important part of any trading solution. But Charles' second point about speed -- speed to market -- is becoming as important, if not more important, than execution speed.
The importance of speed to market stood out to me last week, as I attended a private event held by 20 CIOs of top-tier banks for their top technology partners. The firm has over 19,000 software engineers. As they described their strategic internal technology initiatives, the theme of speed to market was played over and over and over again. One CIO put it this way: "I don't care about cost. If I can get my products to market before my competition, the costs will be taken care of."
Speed to market is not just a marketing slogan at StreamBase, it's at the center of everything we do. StreamBase Studio -- our visual programming environment for CEP -- profoundly changes the way CEP applications are built. Visual programming helps software engineers work more quickly, but that's not all. It also allows business analysts to participate, because they see and understand what the system is doing. Transparency reduces the time it takes to go from idea to implementation. Recently a client told me that their initial system took 4 months, and it would have taken years, and that they modify that system every day. He called their process "perpetual innovation."
Those new to StreamBase are often skeptical that EventFlow really works. The skepticism is often based on their experience with other products that sell the vision of visual programming, but when you want high performance or control, you have to program manually. StreamBase is different -- all our customers use the visual EventFlow language. All of our customers use it for high performance, fault tolerant, scalable production applications. And the proof is when these customers go public, often reporting 50% speed to market improvements, and new internal processes as a result of increased transparency.
Speed to market is critical in Japan now. As Michael Ross, director of business development for SunGard Global Trading in Japan, told Inside Market Data: "The Tokyo Stock Exchange has gone live with new trading systems for equities and options, and as a result, market data volumes have exploded, and a lot of systems in the market can't cope with that -- especially if they are for manual trading,"
Speed times two: speed of execution and speed to market, is what StreamBase and SunGard will bring to the market in Japan.
