(Yawn) Aleri Buys Coral8 - (Wow) Citigroup Stock Falls Below A Buck!
I think Mark over at Citi has been drinking too much of Aleri’s wine over at Columbus Circle. For some reason (must be the wine and marketing hype), Marc thinks that Aleri absorbing Coral8 is “earth-shattering news” ? Obviously, Aleri and Coral8 would like for us to think it was, in Marc’s words “earth-shattering news“; but even in the “small CEP community”, this is, at best, a footnote. Anonymous replies to Marc, as follows:
This is an atom bomb?! Compared to what’s happening in our world lately, this is a flea on an elephant’s ass. Also please get over yourself and be a bit more objective going forward if you want to be taken seriously.
As for me, I agree with Mr. or Ms. Anonymous. In the past, I have agreed with most of what Marc wrote on his blog, but I tend to agree with Anonymous that calling the Aleri-Coral8 merger “earth-shattering news” is not objective.
Anyway, to put things in perspective, Citigroup was basically so poorly managed that the only reason Citi is not bankrupt is that the government has taken them over, handing them mega-billions of our US taxpayer dollars. Recently Citi’s stock traded under a dollar - that is earth-shattering news. As a colleague in Asia once said, “you can’t see the swimmers are naked until the tide goes out” and so it was with Citi. Naked and technically bankrupt.
In fact, when Marc posted his teaser, It Has Begun!!! I thought he was going to announce that Citigroup had been purchased by a leading bank in Japan or that China had agreed to be the next player to bailout Citi, and the US and China were now the majority stockholders of Citigroup. Maybe the board of directors of Citi would report to the United Nations? Or, I thought, at a minimum, maybe Citi had decided to save the taxpayers money and would announce that instead of using expensive proprietary software for simple event stream processing, they would direct their employees to use PERL scripts and Amazon EC2/S3 until after Citi returned money to the US taxpayers.
We live in a very wacky world. Let’s talk about Citigroup and how they were technically bankrupt and had to go to the US taxpayers to keep from completely imploding. Who cares about Aleri and Coral8? Maybe less than a handful of players? It is just a matter of time before more of these “proprietary stream processors” seek “creative business strategies” to stay afloat. Their days are numbered, all of them. Free and open source software (FOSS) is a safer bet.
TIBCO grabbed Syndera for less than 10 cents on the dollar on what investors had sunk into Syndera and that was not “earth-shattering news“. IBM purchased Aptsoft, and that was not “earth-stattering news.” Sorry Marc. Nothing personal. Aleri and Coral8? Yawn.
Filed under: CEP News and Events, Coral8, Event Processing, Financial Services, TIBCO
But, man … what wines they were!
For me, Citi’s stock under a buck is a big yawn. I tend to care about stuff that I can personally control …. such as the technology used in our system.
Nevertheless … it would have been better for me if I had gone off to play marimba for Magma.
Hi Marc!
If you want to control the technology used in your system, move to open source or development platforms with standard-based languages like C, C++, PERL, Eclipse/Java, etc.
Seriously, you can do all the rule-based steam processing your heart desires with either open source or by rolling your own. If you want fast, write it in C or C++ and put a couple of bright Indian programmers to work! Times are tough
As you have pointed out, one of the main issues is that these stream processors are proprietary, their engine, their language, their adapters. You are better off to use C++ for high speed apps and PERL or some other scripting language for lower speed requirements.
After all, processing streaming events in a forward chaining way, running rules against the stream, is not rocket science and not “earth-shattering” LOL
One of our teams evaluated Coral8 for network and security management. We even wrote custom adapters for TCP sockets (could not get a working TCP socket-adapter from Coral8), and we found “an stream processing engine” to be “useless overhead” for network management.
PS: We moved to open source and are very happy we did.
Yours faithfully, Tim
“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” - this is a 2001 Warren Buffet quote - see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett (6th quote in the Sourced section).
Hi Nigel!
Thanks for stopping by! Yes, I always forget that it was Warren Buffet who is credited with that quote, thanks!
Hi Marc!
Regarding your “earth-shattering event”, I agree that the event is important to you and your group since you made the decision to buy Coral8 for Citi. Good luck moving forward. Hope all works out. As you know, buying technology from small companies in emerging markets comes with considerable risk.
Yours sincerely, Tim
Meanwhile, I would be very interested what you think of the Streambase “Amnesty” program.
Hi Anonymous!
Streambase “Amnesty” program?
Well, I think Mark Palmer is a fine fellow and an amazing marketing person.
However, if I was the owner of an event stream processing platform that was used in production in an FSI environment, and I wanted to migrate to a similar commercial platform to mitigate risk, I might go with Progress Apama. Progress is solid. John Bates is “stand up guy” and the Apama platform has proven results in FSI.
Mark Palmer, now CEO and/or COO of Streambase, used to be the visible public figure for Apama, and when Mark was with Apama, he was very negative on Streambase. Unless you are willing to “bet the farm” on one person and (another) small private company, then I suggest you go with Apama. I recommend placing stability above features or perceived features.
Many companies are uncomfortable with open source and risk. Progress is not going anywhere. No one is going to acquire them in the foreseeable future; they are based out of MA with a strong presence in ‘da City” and are solid in FSI.
Disclaimer: I have been drinking beer and listening to rock-and-roll most of the night in a riverside club on the Mae Ping River in Chiang Mai…
Yours sincerely, Tim