Another CEP TLA - BOCI

Colleague Giles Nelson recently commented on the fixation on TLAs and their meanings - a fixation that has seemed to dominate the CEP market's online discussion of late. He suggests that it obscures what is important in terms of coming to appreciate what is really the value of CEP. I tend to agree, though it can be entertaining to monitor the lively - but not necessarily illuminating - debate about internet routers and what kind of router best serves as a metaphor for CEP.

But rather than dwell on real or metaphorical routers, I'll attempt here to interject a bit more substantive news - another Apama customer win, this time the Bank of China.  For purposes of this posting lets call them BOCI (Bank of China International Holdings) to ensure this posting has enough TLA critical mass - though admittedly, BOCI is really an FLA. BOCI has chosen the Progress Apama CEP platform to support algorithmic trading in equities, futures, futures indices, warrants and bonds. With Apama they can receive market data concurrently from both SEHK and HKFE (the Hong Kong Stock and Futures Exchanges respectively) and algorithmically place orders into different sub-markets on these exchanges.

Now, there may be some debate somewhere as to whether this is really CEP. We cannot always provide details regarding the specifics of what a client does; in some instances the client does not share that detail, as they deem it too proprietary and valuable to their business. But the intricacies of trading in such complex markets (with transient liquidity and the need to act quickly in order to capitalize on that liquidity) make these applications excellent CEP use cases. Not all trading applications may represent CEP, but these applications indeed qualify.

TLAs vs. TLIs

On a side note, kudos to Giles Nelson for his posting's reference to "initialisms" vs acronyms.  It prompted a bit of research on the differences between acronyms and initialisms. As it turns out, BOCI is an initialism, not an acronym.  Likewise, so is CEP and perhaps many of the common shorthand abbreviations that dominate technology. If BOCI were an acronym, you would say it like the Italian game: bocce.

So, as far as Apama is concerned, the choices are

Our BOCI is on the far left. :-)