Today Apama announced, with Detica and the FSA, Apama's selection by the UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) (corporate site, wikipedia entry) for Sabre 2, the FSA's new market surveillance and market abuse detection system.
It's difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the news. From a complex event processing (CEP) perspective, this news represents yet another reflection of the maturing CEP software market. For anyone who is not familiar with the FSA, they are the UK-based regulatory body, analogous to the SEC in the United States. The FSA will be using Apama for Sabre 2, their next-generation, real-time market surveillance and market abuse detection system. The FSA selected system integrator Detica to deliver this system; Detica's design for Sabre 2 centered around its ability to detect and regulate aberrant market behavior while it happens, a first for regulatory systems, its believed, in the world. The FSA's ability to monitor market activity as it happens is a great example of what CEP can do - rather than looking in the rear-view mirror at the history of market activity, CEP allows the FSA to understand what's happening now, and, in turn, gives them the potential to stop abusive activity before it winds up impacting the market. For more on the FSA's intentions for the system, read their own words from Sally Dewar's speech here.
As for Apama as a commercial vendor, this "Hollywood" endorsement re-emphasizes Apama's position as the leading and dominant CEP platform vendor, based on the credibility and substance of public customer endorsements. The FSA is the latest public endorsement that now includes JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro, Aspect Capital, HG Trading, Koscom, Julius Baer, Finamex, BGN, and SEB. No other CEP can come close to this list of blue-chip customers. And our list of partners, including Microsoft, Dow Jones, ULLINK, and more - the ecosystem surrounding Apama, is also unrivaled.
From a technology perspective, there were many reasons why Apama was chosen for Sabre 2, despite the fact that many vendors were considered. The basic reasons were that Apama truly is the fastest, most scalable, and most mission-critical CEP platform in the industry, and the most proven, as substantiated by the shear number of endorsements and users in the industry. But the key difference between Apama and all other CEP vendors is our focus on empowering business users - in this case market abuse specialists at the FSA - with our graphical, high-level CEP tool - the Scenario Modeler. This tool allows users that have no development expertise to "paint" CEP logic in minutes, rather than the months that would be required for an SQL-based, programming-laden approach. No other vendor has this approach, although some will claim that Eclipse-based tools to design SQL-like syntax speed of development for developers. Apama has powerful, low-level development tools as well, but its not the only, or best, way to build applications, and it does not empower business analysts. The best approach is a multi-layered one, where business users, business analysts, AND techies are all empowered.
We'll have much more to say about market abuse in the coming days in this blog, but be sure to come by our booth at SIFMA in New York - #2217 in level two, in the Grand Ballroom, and see how Apama can be applied to market surveillance applications.


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