The StreamBase Event Processing Blog

Introducing Live BI and StreamBase LiveView

For some time now, StreamBase has been working on a new product concept that's a little bit CEP, a little bit data warehouse, and a little bit business intelligence. Today we've unveiled it as StreamBase LiveView. Our customers have called it a "game changer," and a product that "fills a massive hole in the BI space." Hyperbole like that needs to be backed up, so here we go.

Complex event processing (introduction on Google+) was envisioned by its inventors as a "database for moving data" as firms increasingly deal with data in motion from mobile devices, social media and digitized data of all types, and in all industries. In its first decade of commercial use, CEP has come to power automated trading on Wall Street. A who's who list of firms have been public about their adoption of CEP, so let's examine the live BI problem in the context of Wall Street.

Industry analysts estimate that over 60% of U.S. equities trading is automated. The problem is, with so much automation, it's impossible to see and act on what's going on, because a typical trading environment can generate 10's of millions of events a day. Existing business intelligence and data warehouse tools aren't used in the front office of Wall Street, because they're designed to summarize what's already happened, not what's happening now. 

StreamBase LiveView brings BI and streaming data together, for the first time. Applications that need Live BI are everywhere on Wall Street - trading risk management, position management, P&L management, surveillance, compliance, and trading itself, as Waters Technology magazine describes in the article that StreamBase Seeks 'Radical Transparancy' in Business Intelligence.

And applications in other markets can be found in any environment that has big data in motion: telecom (location aware insight and live network operations), security (live fraud detection, live surveillance), and e-commerce (live social media analytics, ad placement, big streaming analytics for Hadoop and Flume). These apps can be deployed on premise or distributed in the cloud. 

StreamBase LiveView is built with StreamBase CEP, which provides connectivity to over 125 event-based sources of data and the extreme scalability required by live BI. The server-based architecture is designed to process hundreds of millions of events per node, absorbed from a network of event sources such as an enterprise message bus or scalable event absorption layer like Flume or IBM Streams. At the front end, users can slice and dice streams of data with ad-hoc query tools in the StreamBase LiveView Desktop (shown above). But here's the key: once users ask the questions they want answered, StreamBase LiveView keeps answering their questions - as conditions change in real-time; users see an always-live view of streaming data.

For the user, all this technology means just one thing: they see business intelligence that's constantly fresh and relevant to their business operations. It's not a view of 5 days ago, or even 5 minutes ago. The data is live, the insight is live, and live insight can lead to live action.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+ give us a live view of what's happening in our social networks; StreamBase LiveVew gives firms a live view of their enterprise data.

To learn more, watch the StreamBase LiveView presentation, follow new materials, articles, and resources on Google+ (+StreamBase and CEO +Mark Palmer), read industry analyst Curt Monash, DMBS2.0, or follow StreamBase Systems (@streambase), CEO Mark Palmer (@mrkwpalmer ), and CTO Richard Tibbetts (@tibbets) on Twitter.

 

Thomson Reuters Selects StreamBase CEP for Elektron High-Speed Cloud, Quant Platform, Apps, and FX

Today we're excited to report that Thomson Reuters has selected StreamBase as its complex event processing (CEP) platform for a broad set of initiatives. CEP "flips the database on its head" by providing the ability to monitor, analyze, and act on events happening in real-time, rather than looking in the rear-view-mirror of what happened yesterday, last week, or last month. CEP powers real-time, big data applications on Wall Street including high frequency trading, pre-trade risk management, surveillance, market data management, smart order routing, pricing, settlement, real-time P&L, monitoring - applications from front to back office on Wall Street.

Why did Thomson Reuters partner with StreamBase for CEP? Initially, they announced four reasons: 

StreamBase in Elektron Brings CEP to Thomson Reuters' High-Speed Cloud

The StreamBase platform lies at the heart of a new generation of real-time, automated applications on Wall Street. As the use of CEP continues to grow, our customers increasingly ask to deploy some of their applications in the cloud. They want their automated processing to happen as close to the exchange as possible for the lowest possible latency, and they want secure and reliable access to their market data.

Thomson Reuters announced that they will provide StreamBase CEP in Elektron, their open, global, ultra-high speed and resilient network for the financial industry. By adding StreamBase CEP to Elektron, Thomson Reuters is creating the industry’s only platform that includes comprehensive real-time and historical data, high capacity network connectivity, managed hosting services, and CEP for rapid application development and strategy deployment.

The First End-to-End Quant Platform for Back Testing, Algorithmic Development and Deployment

Although StreamBase is all about acting on what's happening now, the knowledge of what happened yesterday is essential for any automated system. History is essential to discover trends and patterns in event streams. History is essential to back test automated strategies. History is essential to gain perspective on real-time actions at execution time. Over 90% of applications that use StreamBase also use some form of historical event data management.

Thomson Reuters will integrate StreamBase with the Enterprise Platform for Velocity Analytics, which integrates all Thomson Reuters content, including tick history, reference data, corporate actions, condition code processing and cancellation and correction messages. It also brings together many disparate third party applications including data management solutions, EMS, OMS, price discovery, back testing, trade surveillance and low latency execution capabilities across the quantitative research and trading workflow.

By integrating Velocity Analytics with StreamBase CEP, Thomson Reuters has created the first end-to-end quant platform for back testing, algorithmic development and deployment. 

Thomson Reuters Applications "Powered By" StreamBase

Thomson Reuters will deliver a suite of applications that are “powered by” StreamBase CEP to address low-latency workflow. CEP inside will provide Thomson Reuters clients the benefit of time to market usually associated with turnkey solutions, while at the same time allowing full customizability of the underlying application. One application Thomson Reuters already provides is the real-time surveillance application from Redkite financial which is based on the StreamBase CEP platform. 

StreamBase and Thomson Reuters FX Solutions

The FX markets have rapidly emerged as an important market for the capabilities of CEP. Thomson Reuters announced that StreamBase CEP will complement the existing Thomson Reuters Dealing Aggregator FX trading solution, available exclusively to Thomson Reuters Dealing customers, by providing CEP capability in tandem with the low latency algo trading platform. 

Why did Thomson Reuters choose StreamBase? Mike Powell, Global Head of Enterprise Real-Time Solutions for Thomson Reuters, said it this way: “The financial market landscape continues to evolve rapidly, meaning that nimbleness and time to market have become essential for market participants. Elektron empowers our customers to innovate and achieve high performance through a seamless infrastructure that brings together global market participants, delivers world-class content and creates a suite of new added-value services. The combination of StreamBase’s market leading CEP engine together with Elektron will provide a platform for us to deliver flexible and sophisticated solutions to our customers faster and more efficiently.”

For StreamBase, we’re excited about the vast resources and capabilities of Thomson Reuters can provide our customers. We’re honored to be selected as Thomson Reuters’ CEP platform of choice - their selection validates our focused approach to CEP, the ever increasing importance of the cloud and real-time big data, the disruption of simplicity, and the continued need for low latency and scalability on Wall Street. 

 

CEP Begins to Break Out with Enterprise Deployment: BNY ConvergEx

A popular topic at the event processing sessions in September at the Gartner event processing conference was whether CEP would "break out" of established application areas, like algorithmic trading.   Today StreamBase announced a deployment that marks an important milestone in the industry - broad IT and business application deployment - beyond point applications.

Specifically, ConvergEx has announced it has deployed StreamBase for market interaction monitoring, routing, trading operations analysis, credit risk correlation, system health monitoring and real-time analysis of market feeds for latency and response time.  It provides these services BNY ConvergEx’s entire U.S. electronic trading infrastructure, which includes its dark liquidity pool VortEx.

CEP deployment for market interaction, routing, credit risk, and system health monitoring is a important milestone, and it shows that CEP is maturing to be a key element of the IT fabric. 

StreamBase has always been known as the high-performance, multi-threaded engine with a focus on an SQL-oriented event processing metaphor.  In my first 6 months at StreamBase, I've built an appreciation for what the StreamBase engineering team has done to make CEP truly enterprise class:  visual debugging, unit testing, profiling, and CEP coding that doesn't rely on generated code.   So I was thrilled when we announced in the release of StreamBase 6.0 - the industry's first CEP platform to deploy a visual debugger, profiler, and testing environment in June.  StreamBase became the first CEP platform to deliver on a complete set of enterprise-class deployment features.

One of the elements Joe Weisbord from ConvergEx pointed out in his quote about this deployment was the speed with which his team developed algorithms that analyze the real-time trading operations at VortEx.  This allows the ConvergEx trading operations to understand an ever-increasing set of conditions in their operations, including: “SMS me when any client order gets rejected over $50K”;  “Why was my order canceled or rejected?”;  “Which order did a reject come from?”;  “Alert me when any order on ARCA crosses my maximum tolerance for latency”;   “Warn me by email when 30 minute average latency is trending toward my maximum”;  “Alert me when any client submits an order over $150K”;  “Show me all orders rejected in the last 30 minutes and show me why?”

In the past several weeks, trading volumes have been going through the roof.  Being able to manage market interaction, routing, trading operations, credit risk correlation, and system health is becoming increasingly critical with increased volatility.  As BNY ConvergEx shows us, CEP is becoming the choice for leading trading houses to deploy mission critical controls on electronic trading.