01:58 PM
Progress Apama’s New Complex Event Processing Platform Slashes Latency
Progress Apama (booth #2415) will unveil Progress Apama 4.0, the latest release of the vendor's complex event processing (CEP) platform. The firm is reporting a five-fold reduction in end-to-end latency in CEP applications due to a new communications infrastructure.
"We're going to [provide] one-fifth of the latency in many applications," says John Bates, founder and managing director of Progress Apama, whose platform is used to build trading applications, including market aggregation, smart order routing, and risk management systems, as well as algorithmically driven systems. Such results, according to Bates, were achieved "through improvements in our ... engine."
To reduce latency, Apama developed a completely new transport layer — the method by which events from the market, such as ticks and quotes, are carried through adapters and communicated to an engine, and then sent out through other adapters. Apama also enhanced the engine to improve the way it calculates results, Bates says.
The new communications infrastructure also supports a new systems monitoring interface based on REST (Representative State Transfer), Bates adds.
Version 4.0 of the CEP platform also enhances the user experience. "We can make CEP easier to access and use for a range of business users and technologists," Bates relates. "People wanted an easy, out-of-the-box experience." He notes that new users are on both the IT and the business sides, which have their own requirements.
For example, Bates says, a technical user might utilize the Eclipse Framework, a standard for tying together different development tools, while the IT user may program in an event programming language, build an adapter and connect it to a market data feed. A business user, however, may use graphical building blocks or smart blocks (developed by the IT user). "They can go from the graphical modeler to the smart block to the underlying model all within the same tool," he explains.
To help business users get acquainted with the platform, Progress Apama 4.0 contains a set of demo applications that they can modify and customize with a single click before viewing their changes to the front end and the logic. "It's all simple instead of lots of tools, windows and complexity," according to Bates. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio