The news today in the field of event processing is that Vhayu Technologies was acquired by Thomson Reuters, sparking a flurry of inquiries from press and analysts asking: "How does this change the complex event processing (CEP) landscape?" The short answer is: it doesn't.
Event storage is not synonymous with event processing. Vhayu's tag lne is:"Store and query years of tick data." The ability to store and query years of tick (event) data is crucial for back-testing real-time systems, for historical analysis, and for research and development of high-frequncy trading strategies. Event processing is used to help applications monitor, analyze and act on streaming data in real-time. Usually, customers use both at the same time to process historical, and real-time, streams of events.
Indeed, this is why Vhayu and Thomson Reuters are both strong partners with StreamBase (Vhayu and StreamBase Partner to Provide Real-Time and Historical Market Data Solutions... and StreamBase and Reuters Extend Next-Generation Market Data Development Environment). These are not "Barney" partnerships ("I love you, you love me:") - the partnerships are driven by customer use. For example, RBC uses StreamBase and Vhayu together. And StreamBase and Reuters is one of the most common and critical link our platform supports, and has supported, for years.
So what does all of this mean? It means that the event processing market is continuing to grow in importance - both the database side and the event-processing side. It means the "IBM of Capital Markets," Thomson Reuters, has endorsed event processing, again. And when viewed in the context of strategic enterprise endorsements of CEP like CME Group, it means event processing is continuing to gain market and strategic momentum in the capital markets.