An emerging technology, CEP is closely aligned with the consultancy's strategy of constant innovation and company growth through partnerships with fast-growing product companies. Current technology partners include Coral8, Progress Apama and StreamBase Systems.

Daniel Chait, co-founder and Managing Director at Lab49, said, "Lab49 constantly evaluates new technologies, seeking those innovations which stand to impact financial services firms. With this new practice, we are both helping clients to understand what these new products have to offer, and working with them to create the next generation of real-time information systems. CEP applications also fit nicely with other advanced technologies Lab49 has expertise in, such as large-scale grid computing and advanced visualization."

Overall CEP technology has been gaining market share and is now poised to become a central component of many business-critical applications within financial services. While such systems have previously been thought of as applicable within a narrow range of applications, today firms are using them for everything from algorithmic trading, to derivatives pricing, to real-time, cross-asset risk management.

Brad Bailey, Senior Analyst with the Aite Group, said, "As a solution, CEP will offer an increasingly compelling value proposition in a number of areas within the capital markets. The evolution of a CEP framework for viewing databases and live data will have profound implications for database companies and the ways in which people view their data. The ability to gather or query information from real-time streaming data with minimal latency will only increase the use of CEP as a 'database' tool."

"The increasing liquidity of markets within both the Fixed Income and Equities worlds presents dual challenges to securities trading organisations. On the one hand, improved market efficiency means that more sophisticated approaches are required to generate trading profit, yet this same efficiency requires that these approaches be able to process huge volumes of data with very low decision latency. CEP is a valuable technology for meeting these challenges," said Luke Flemmer, co-founder and Managing Director, Lab49.