Equipping the agile business

Terry Cunningham, CEO of Coral8, Inc., explains how complex event processing software could help address the challenge of managing growing volumes of data.

Today’s corporate networks are forced to deal with growing volumes of fast-moving data, both from inside and outside the organization. Meanwhile, the pressure on companies to proactively monitor these data streams to stay ahead of the competition is mounting. However, existing data management and analytical software products are simply not designed to meet the sheer volume and speed of this data, and custom developed solutions are proving too costly for many companies to build and maintain.

In an exclusive interview with FST, Terry Cunningham, CEO of Coral8, Inc., explains how complex event processing software could provide an effective solution, by detecting time-critical business opportunities and threats as they happen, not after-the-fact, and thereby increasing that all important business agility.

FST. What are the challenges for organizations in dealing with these ever greater volumes of data, and what can the rewards of doing so effectively?
TC. At the highest level, greater use of high-speed data can lead to increased visibility and faster actions. This means firms can find opportunities sooner than their competitors and can resolve possible threats before they become meaningful problems.

The technical challenge is in processing such a high volume of data and producing from it reliable business-level information in a timely fashion, which will allow the business to act quickly. This is no small task.

FST. What specific needs or demands are there for financial services organizations?
TC. Competition, customer relationships and management of risk are three of the most important issues we hear from many FSIs. If you do not see the opportunities and react quickly to them, your competitors surely will. Ineffective customer relationships can result in lost revenues, either through churn or lost cross-sell or up-sell opportunities. We have all seen how undetected risk and fraud can create financial problems.

This places incredibly difficult demands on the IT organization to build and deploy more applications that help the FSI to deal with these three important business issues.

FST. So how is event processing infrastructure addressing these needs?
TC. Event processing infrastructure gives IT organizations a high performance, re-usable software package, that enabling applications that can find opportunities before an institution’s competitors, better manage its relationships with customers, and detect threats before they impact the company. A common, reusable infrastructure allows IT organizations to build and reliably deploy a powerful new breed of event processing applications, faster and at much lower cost structure.

FST. What essential elements should characterize an event processing solution – what would you advise that an FSI look for?
TC. First and foremost, an event processing solution must offer high performance and continuous availability. Without these, IT groups will not even consider deploying your solution.

After this, the most critical capability is to allow developers to deliver powerful new applications faster and at a lower cost. The best way to do this is by offering a true language, based on SQL, that has natural yet powerful extensions for event processing, and secondly through a flexible, ‘configure-to-deploy’ platform that allows developers to dynamically configure applications and servers.

FST. Is there growing interest and demand for your solutions in this field? If so, what do you think is driving the trend?
TC. We see demand from two places: corporate IT groups and ISV solution providers. Both groups have been developing event processing functionality from scratch, slowing their delivery and inflating their costs. A reusable, packaged software platform allows IT teams to lower development, maintenance and management costs.

We are also seeing tremendous interest because of our language, CCL. It is a true language that is based on SQL – not just a GUI or a new rules language. Developers love it because it has almost no learning curve, offers a great combination of power and ease, and supports dynamic creation of applications.

Solutions providers face similar issues. Many have been building custom event processing functionality for years, or have avoided adding such functionality due to the cost. We have one OEM who will deliver a new application module with substantial new event processing functionality in a matter of weeks – a delivery cycle unheard of in the ISV community.

FST. Do you have any strategies for the future – how do you plan to develop your solutions to adapt to the changing needs of FSIs?
TC. The financial services industry contains some of the most demanding IT environments. Event processing applications will continue to grow in three dimensions: greater volumes of data, increased complexity and more application deployments. We offer a number of great features to solve these issues today, but we’ll constantly work with our customers to increase performance and throughput, enable our language and tools to support more complex event correlation and matching, and make configuration and management even easier.

Terry Cunningham
Coral8’s CEO, Terry Cunningham founded Crystal Decisions in 1984. Under his leadership, the company developed Crystal Reports, and strategically partnered with Microsoft and over 200 other OEM's to make Crystal Reports the world’s number one reporting tool. In 1994, Cunningham sold the company to Seagate Technology and continued on as the latter’s president.

In 1998 Terry put together one of the largest software mergers ever undertaken, combining Seagate's Network and Storage Management Group with VERITAS Software. He became the President and Chief Operating Officer of the new VERITAS with approximately 3500 employees and close to US$700 million in revenue. In 1999, Terry retired from VERITAS and continued using his vast experience in mergers and acquisitions, strategic planning and positioning to help software CEOs grow their companies into world-class success stories, until he joined Coral8 in 2003.