CEP down under

I’m sitting here at Melbourne Airport in Australia on my way to Hong Kong. I’ve been delayed by a typhoon – probably a good reason to delay. After a very successful week in Sydney and Melbourne visiting customers, I thought I’d report that the CEP market is hotting up down under! As you would expect financial services is an early adopter and Apama has had several customers in Australia in this space for a few years now. But the demand is increasing. This is driven by factors such as increasing competitive pressures in the trading space and the impending fragmentation of the Australian market. Just like in Europe and North America, it is likely that several new trading venues will join the Australian Stock Exchange in offering liquidity in Australia. My diagram shows some of these in the form of Chi-X, AXE and Liquidnet.

Complex Event Processing offers a powerful way of monitoring, aggregating and analyzing the liquidity across all of these markets, as well as making real-time routing decisions. This of course can work in parallel with traders and algorithms. In fact it is becoming very interesting to see trading decision algorithms routing messages to execution algorithms, routing messages to liquidity tracking algorithms, routing trades to the market, which are being checked by market surveillance algorithms -- and all part being implemented in CEP. I am biased of course, but what other technology can offer the seamless federation of such systems. Events provide a powerful and low latency mechanism for such interoperation. Each component can be built independent of the other - but yet they can work together seamlessly. But I am getting off topic!

Over the last few years Australia has mainly been interested in equities algorithms, but now the interest in FX, futures, bonds and commodities is growing. While I was in Sydney, I was pleased to deliver the keynote address at the Trading Technology conference and met many interesting sellside and buyside participants with a variety of trading interests. It was fascinating to see how the market is developing.

And it is not just financial services where CEP is being applied down under. I also met with organizations in a number of other spaces including travel, transportation and location-based services. I hope to report more on these in the near future.

And now I look forward to finding out what is happening in Hong Kong and Asia beyond. Hopefully I can avoid the typhoon!

John