In a bid to win a greater share of the financial services market, Progress Software has established a specialist team in Australia to sell algorithmic trading software and fraud detection services.
The firm already has a number of high profile clients including ABN Amro, the Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase, which use the Apama event processing platform to drive applications that monitor fast moving streams of data analysing patterns in milliseconds.
It allows financial institutions to respond to complex market events in real time for algorithmic trading, risk management, market aggregation and pricing.
Announcing the team, Progress Software A/NZ country manager Jeremy Goddard, said algorithmic trading is giving financial services companies an edge in the market in asset classes from equities, futures and options to cross-asset class trading and foreign exchange.
"The time is right to set up our own dedicated team to focus on this specialised area," Goddard said adding that the technology allows firms to gain greater control over their trading strategies and identify new channels for revenue.
A 20 year veteran in IT and financial services, Richard Massey has been appointed senior sales executive while John Doherty takes on the role of senior presales consultant.
Doherty has managed global accounts such as the ANZ Bank, National Australia Bank, Fosters Brewing, Telstra and BHP.
Complex event processing has a sleek, shiny, space-age allure and has been blinking on the IT industry's "next big thing" radar for quite a while.
This is because event-driven application architectures are becoming more important for modern business, as the volume of time-sensitive, real-time data that enterprise and carrier networks must process, store and manage continues to expand.
The technology is also known as "event processing" or "event stream processing" and is still predominantly deployed as a stovepipe for specialized, albeit mission-critical, applications.
It is especially strong in finance, telecommunications, transportation, manufacturing and the military.
Progress Software will go head to head with rivals Tibco, Oracle, BEA and IBM, who also have event driven offerings.
Gartner vice president of application strategy, Roy Schulte, said BEA's entrance into the event processing market ealier this year is further proof that the market is going mainstream.
"Oracle and Tibco are also already active in this market, and IBM, Microsoft and SAP are expected to expand their event-processing offerings during the next 18 months," Schulte said.
"The product is potentially applicable anywhere there are high-volume event streams and a need to detect threats or opportunities quickly [with sub-second latency]," Schulte said.
"Until recently, this kind of scenario was only found in niche applications, such as financial trading, telco, and network management.
"During the past several years, however, many new types of stream processing applications have emerged in such areas as customer experience management, credit card security and fraud detection, transportation operations, and compliance."
- with Paul Krill