In yet another in a string of press releases about nothing, StreamBase announced version 5 of their product. I usually don't comment on the vacuous releases that come from this vendor, because I prefer to stick to substantial developments in the industry, but the coverage of StreamBase in DataMation included a priceless quote that I could not resist from CEO Barry Morris:

"It's not anymore about how StreamBase is 10 times faster than the next-fastest platform. It's about successes in the market. We're deployed in everything across financial markets right through to massively multi-user games and big federal projects."

Let's explore this a bit more deeply: first of all, the claim of 10X performance than the next-fastest platform is simply delusional: there are no CEP benchmarks in the industry. To claim performance superiority without proof points is old-fashioned corporate marketing hubris, and StreamBase continues on this ill-advised path to mis-lead the market with unsubstantiated claims. The good news is that intelligent consumers are not fooled by this press-release / sound bite approach.
But the second statement is even more fascinating - that StreamBase has turned its attention, after much online browbeating, to "success in the market" as the barometer for credibility. Let's explore their proclaimation of leadership in this space, because it is easy to validate: on their web site, StreamBase reports two customers. Their "financial markets" customer is a company called Wall Street on Demand. We're heavily into capital markets at Apama, and I had never heard of WSOD, so I went to their web site to check out what "leading-edge" stuff they are doing with StreamBase. Here's a link to their web site so you can check it out too. This company is an 8-person web design shop! Apparently they have created some sort of market data parsing application with StreamBase, but this application is not mentioned or described on their web site. The other customer they cite is a gaming company called BioWare, that announced that they selected (not deployed) StreamBase. This is an interesting use case, but there's nothing public to suggest that BioWare has deployed StreamBase in any of their multi-user games. I guess we'll have to install their product "Destroy All Humans!" to find out some day.
It's interesting to contrast this claim of customer success and leadership with the amazing list of references offered by the other CEP vendors who not only humbly offer credible proof points, but they also pay careful attention to making balanced, substantial noise in the market. Among them are:

1. Kaskad (Boston Stock Exchange)
2. Aleri Labs (Commerzbank)
3. TIBCO BusinessEvents (Air France / KLM, Telecom Italia)
4. Coral8 (Patient Care Technology Systems)
5. Apama (JP Morgan, ABN Amro, Deutsche Bank, SEB, Finamex, Koscom, Bank Julius Baer, BGN (Item-level RFID))

CEP is an exciting, growing industry, and continued focus on credible proof points of its superior approach are the key to fueling this growth, and we hope the entire industry follows the path of education, not exaggeration, as CEP continues to grow.



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