With Sybase ESP, Headstrong was able to accelerate the development of customer-facing financial applications that leverage high volumes of data from multiple sources in real time. This, in turn, allowed Headstrong to facilitate instantaneous trade verification and validation in one case, and market making and hedging in another case.

As Headstrong began to develop two of its key solutions - Teevra, a real-time trade-matching system and STRIDE, a trading solution for CFD 's (Contracts for Difference) - the company researched complex event processing (CEP) platforms that could serve as the core engine for specific functionality within these two applications. Headstrong needed a CEP platform that would support the level of transaction rates, throughput and latency that are essential to the performance of STRIDE due to ever increasing volumes across markets.

"Because of the time to market and complexity involved in building a platform from scratch, we chose not to build a CEP-like platform ourselves, and instead looked for a partner solution that would streamline the development of our applications," says Prakash Neelakantan, Head of Products for Headstrong. "The Sybase Event Stream Processor interface accelerates application development and plays a major role in the success of our real-time, security-trading platforms. In addition, the clustering capability allows us to scale our applications and deliver a more resilient solution, which gives us the freedom to focus on the business rules that we can build on the Sybase Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine."

Sybase ESP empowers software development firms to deliver real-time applications such as continuous risk-assessment and low-latency algorithmic trading. The technology also facilitates the creation and dissemination of highly-enriched market data in a fraction of the time that traditional approaches require. Sybase ESP also allows users to obtain intelligence on high-speed strstreaming data with minimum latency. Sybase ESP enables Continuous Intelligence, letting software developers quickly create solutions that monitor, detect, analyze and respond to events as they occur. This empowers brokers and their customers to make opportune corrective, profitable, competitive and value-add financial decisions.

Sybase ESP, the latest release of the award winning Sybase Aleri CEP platform, consists of a high performance complex event processing engine, the ESP Studio, and a range of integration tools including adapters and APIs. Designed as a new modeling paradigm, Sybase ESP combines drag and drop simplicity with a full SQL-based programming language for power users. As a real-time intelligence solution, Sybase ESP comprises a dynamic environment, facilitating the addition of new continuous queries at any time.

"The sheer volume of data in today's production environments, combined with heterogeneous sources and the need for real-time delivery, calls for breakthrough solutions," said Domenic Iannaccone, Director of Business Development, Financial Services Industry, Sybase Inc. "Accelerating demands for faster app development and overall speed-to-market make Sybase ESP a crucial differentiator and provide our partners and customers with a key competitive advantage."