In "Deciphering the Myths Surrounding CEP," I wrote that CEP is not a mature technology. Palmer disagrees that point, arguing that CEP is a mature technology given that CEP's use on Wall Street is expanding and now includes public customers such as the FSA and Turquoise, both of which chose Progress Apama. I agree that CEP is expanding and proliferating both on and off the trading desk. Regulators seem to like the technology - as evidenced by the FSA adopting it and Turquoise has developed a market surveillance system with Progress Apama.

While CEP has taken off in algorithmic trading and liquidity aggregation and is gaining momentum in other areas, like risk management, that doesn't mean it's a mature technology. it certainly is a proven technology and a stable technology but the message conveyed by analysts and one practitioner is that CEP has growing pains. At Accelerating Wall Street, Marc Adler, SVP Equities and Head of Complex Event Processing at Citi noted there is a huge debate in the CEP community over whether SQL is appropriate as a language. Adler also advised financial firms to find out whether a vendor is a general purpose CEP provider or specializes in one area. Then there was talk of potential alliances between CEP vendors and middleware engines ( i.e. RTI with Streambase and/or Coral8) and whether or not CEP products came with adaptors out-of-the-box to access Tibco. Overall, I got the feeling from the conference that CEP is an evolving technology and one that isn't necessarily set in stone.

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