Second acquisition in one week: Software AG acquires Apama

This week is certainly a game changer in the event processing universe. 

The purchase of Apama by Progress Software in 2005 has been a major milestone in the event processing history,  acquisition of a start-up by a (relatively) big company, and start of a new period.   Today's announcement is the acquisition of Apama by Software AG.   This is different from the acquisition announced earlier this week of Streambase by TIBCO  since it is not an acquisition of an entire company, but of a division within a company, and of course, its technology and customers.   According to the announcement, John Bates, Apama's founder and Progress Software's CTO will join Software AG, and lead Apama again.  

I wish John and the Apama team good luck in their transition, and hope that a company in the magnitude of Software AG will be able to promote the state-of-the-art in the event processing area.

Progress Apama announces a version which compiles to native machine code

Progress Software announced today on the release of a new version that compiles the Apama EPL into native machine code, claiming to improve the performance of the previous version by 2000%.   They don't mention what they actually measure.   The big data era renews the investment in scalable event processing solutions with various ways of optimizations.   We may start to see specialized event processing hardware. 

I think that it will be useful to establish a set of benchmarks, since it was seen in some works that there are huge differences in performance between types of event processing application - for example: those doing mainly filtering, those doing mainly aggregations, and those doing pattern matching.  It will be good to have a set of benchmarks that fit different types of applications, and a method to map application characteristics to a specific benchmark - to avoid the phenomenon that vendors cite numbers that cannot be compared.  More -later.