Waters Rankings 2013: Winners' Circle — New Frontiers

The big news for StreamBase this year has, of course, been its recent acquisition by Tibco. How has that been progressing, and what are the benefits?
It’s progressing well—we’re very excited about it. The major benefits are the tighter integration between StreamBase and Tibco’s product portfolio. Tibco has a great presence in messaging, and from their perspective, this gives a renewed commitment to capital markets and event processing. We’re able to partner with their offerings that are very synergistic with the StreamBase product. That’s not only in messaging, but data fabric, social media and other areas.

CEP has been a hot topic for a while in financial services, and its uses are now being recognized outside of its traditional heartland in algorithmic trading. What are the areas where you are seeing exciting developments?
The home has been in the front office, whether it’s in algorithmic trading, execution management or hedging. We’re seeing a lot of uptake in the compliance, surveillance and monitoring spaces. As those areas become real time in nature, there’s a need for event-driven architectures of the sort that a CEP platform can provide. What we’re seeing in risk management is probably the most exciting area for us. Because of the increase in the availability of data, and the increase in computational power, people are looking at doing more analytics—which typically used to be done in an end-of-day, retrospective manner—whether it’s value-at-risk calculations or counterparty risk, in an online, real-time environment. Essentially, whenever you want to make a decision based on timely information, CEP can play a part.

What sets StreamBase apart from its competitors in the CEP space?
One of the major differentiations for StreamBase is the quality of our development tools. Our tools really facilitate what we call a heterogeneous development team, where you have professional developers, quantitative analysts, and business stakeholders all being able to understand and manipulate their application through our visual development environment. That really assists with not only getting a first version of your systems implemented, but also iterating and responding to changing market conditions. There’s also connectivity and speed, which are helped in the way that we connect to data sources, and our existing components, so people can get trading systems up and running quickly, while keeping key stakeholders involved at all stages of the implementation.

What does the company have planned for the next year?
We have a big announcement at our user conference in October, which is going to be very exciting, and we have a lot of work ahead in terms of our integration with the Tibco product portfolio. There are a lot of opportunities there; in collaboration with Tibco, we’re taking the platform and expanding outside of markets and into their customer bases in the telecommunications, energy, government, and retail sectors. So there’s a lot of excitement for us as an organization, in the sense that we’re able to not only leverage the analytics platform in the capital markets, but also elsewhere.

“Our tools really facilitate what we call a heterogeneous development team, where you have professional developers, quantitative analysts, and business stakeholders all being able to understand and manipulate their application through our visual development environment.” —Richard Tibbetts, Tibco StreamBase