Event Processing

"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows."
- Aristotle Onassis

Business Challenge

Business planning by looking in the rear view mirror hampers financial firms’ ability to compete. Finding out that your network security was breached last week, that 6% of trading last month did not meet full compliance or that fraudulent activity in online accounts was up 25% last quarter is not good enough in today’s world. Firms need the ability to identify and respond to events as they are occurring. One of the fastest growing segments of real-time technology is complex event processing (CEP) — the ability to analyze streams of information and identify individual or groups of events that represent problems or opportunities for the firm.

However, CEP is not a panacea. CEP engines rely on sophisticated rules engines to isolate interesting events and correlate them in relation to time or sequence. Even the most advanced CEP engine runs out of steam quickly in the face of current financial services data rates. Furthermore, to understand the events at all, CEP engines must receive them in an understandable data format. This raises the age old integration questions: do you deploy legions of adapters or take the performance hit of transforming data in the cloud?

To fully realize the benefits of CEP, financial firms need an infrastructure that can filter many million of events per second and selectively transform and forward the interesting events to CEP engines. This architectural approach of pre-filtering and normalizing event streams can increase the effectiveness of CEP solutions by an order of magnitude.

Solution Summary

Solace provides sophisticated middleware functionality in hardware to monitor, filter, route, transform and secure very large volumes of events in real time and with minimal processing overhead. Solace uses leading-edge FPGA, ASIC and network processor technology to increase throughput and lower latency of event processing. Applications such as fraud detection, algorithmic trading, compliance, insider trade monitoring, risk management and more can be tackled more effectively by separating the simple monitoring, filtering and normalization of raw events from the complex processing of select events. This event pre-processing takes the burden off CEP engines allowing individual engines to be much more effective.

Value to Customers

Adding an event monitoring and processing layer in support of CEP provides substantial value to financial organizations:

  • More immediate results – Solace’s hardware approach provides many scale and performance advantages over software equivalents. The time lag between an event occurring and a CEP condition being identified is dramatically shortened by pre-filtering and normalizing events, offloading work from the CEP engine.
  • Increased range of solutions – A workhorse event pre-processing layer provides advanced filtering, content routing and transformation to form the basis of a flexible event processing fabric. This means CEP applications can handle more volume and execute more sophisticated rule bases allowing new uses that are impractical in software deployments.
  • Improved corporate agility – A Solace infrastructure for managing events allows many more business activities and processes to be monitored resulting in more accurate and timely insights as conditions change.
  • Reduced solution costs – Deploying event pre-processing in hardware reduces overall solution costs by requiring fewer messaging, filtering, transformation and CEP engine servers and associated software licenses. Solution management and administration costs are also dramatically reduced as racks of servers can often be reduced to just a few.