Making sense of it all 2

In the
previous article with this title I discussed the
consolidation of the MDM market. The same thing is happening in
the CEP (complex event processing) market. However, here matters
are somewhat different. In this sector, first IBM acquired
AptSoft, then Aleri merged with Coral8, Informatica got
AgentLogic and, most recently, Sybase has acquired the assets of
Aleri (along with Coral8).

In the case of IBM, this means that that company has two major
CEP engines: AptSoft, which is primarily used in conjunction with
business process management, and InfoSphere Streams, which is the
high-end, more serious CEP product. Informatica, on the other
hand, primarily acquired AgentLogic to support event-driven data
integration, though AgentLogic is still being targeted at
government implementations where it has historically been strong.

Sybase is different, and it now has three CEP engines since it
also has its own Sybase CEP product that works in conjunction
with Sybase RAP (real-time analytics platform). However, before
Sybase released its own CEP engine it partnered with, amongst
others, Aleri and, in fact, Aleri has been a Sybase VAR for a
number of years, so the acquisition is not simply tactical and to
gain market share (though it undoubtedly does that) but it also
has a more strategic rationale.

The point here is that these acquisitions were actually done for
different reasons, at least in part. However, the Sybase
purchase, in particular, raises interesting questions. For one
thing, it means that Streambase is pretty much the only pure play
left in the capital markets sector, which now looks like being
carved up by Sybase, Streambase and Progress between them. But is
Streambase big enough to continue on its own? A merger with
Vertica seems likely at some point.

However, this is not the whole point. This acquisition pretty
much marks the end of consolidation within the CEP capital
markets sector. However, there remains the infrastructure market,
exemplified by AptSoft and AgentLogic, and it is also notable
that Progress recently bought Saviion and the company is likely
to integrate this with Progress Apama to compete in this space.

However, perhaps most interesting is the RFID and sensor space,
where there are other active CEP vendors like Starview and Event
Zero. This is starting to ramp up and, interestingly, Sybase has
stated that it plans to extend beyond capital markets in due
course, and IBM has already done so. Progress has some customers
here already and obviously this represents an opportunity for
Streambase also.

So, what we have is a partial consolidation in the CEP market for
one particular sector. It will be some time before that spreads
into other areas, where markets are still in their infancy.