Today, Forrester released their evaluation of CEP vendors, and declared StreamBase a leader in the space. Wonderful news - we're very proud.
That said, analysts typically perform paper evaluations. Forrester's paper evaluation is a good tool, and helps prospects create short lists for competitive evaluations. But as a technologist, I'm thankful for the recent public disclosure of findings from some deep-dive customer evaluations from the last six months. These evaluations were performed by firms that installed the products and ran, in many cases, stringent benchmarks and scalability tests. They evaluated the debugging tools by using them, and used deployment features like high availability. They looked at how easily threading or partitioning behavior can be designed and controlled by doing it.
In some cases, these firms released hard numbers. In others, we have generic performance characterization information that we provide on an as-needed basis. And in many cases, they put their money where their mouths are - they made one choice and bought the product. In case you missed them, here's the public take on some of these evaluations:
- CME Group (Press release, CME Group by the Numbers article, follow @CMEGroup on Twitter)
- RBC (Press coverage in Inside Market Data)
- BNY ConvergEx (Press coverage in The Trade)
- PhaseCapital (Blog post: 5 Observations about PhaseCapital's selection of CEP, blog post: 8 Lessons for Entrepreneurs - Based on PhaseCapital)
- BlueCrest (BlueCrest case study, interview with Justo Ruiz-Ferrer from BlueCrest)
Among the more interesting evaluations was the CME Group's work. They performed the most exhaustive CEP evaluation I've seen in years - perhaps ever - and their findings reflect what we typically see when you dig in deep and stand StreamBase, Aleri, Coral8, IBM, Oracle and Progress Apama against each other.
Steve Goldman, the director of Technology Architecture from CME Group, said it nicely and even put it on video for us, where he cited usability ("The business users and technology users felt the StreamBase technology was heads above everybody else"), horizontal scalability & performance ("This was very, very important"), and sustainability ("The ability to run the platform reliably and with fault tolerance was key.") as the key reasons why the CME Group chose StreamBase as the leader, and the choice for their enterprise CEP deployment.
Here's the clip of Steve from CME Group, in his own words:
This endorsement was so strong and decisive that some of our competitors have started making crazy claims, including that StreamBase gave their product to CME Group for the endorsement. In some cases the claims are so unprofessional that I enjoy nothing more than personally responding to them (with appropriate confidentiality of course). In fact, I enjoy doing this so much, I decided to put it right out here on the blog and offer my direct contact. I can be reached at [email protected], or directly in my office: +1 781 761-0812. Naturally, sales solicitations are not welcome and will not be returned.