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January 21, 2008
Software/Middleware:
BEA, Lab49 Tackle the Capital Market Front Office

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 14 -- BEA Systems Inc., a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced a new framework approach to utilize the BEA WebLogic Event Server, a Java application server designed for event-driven applications.

In partnership with Lab49 and Intel, the framework is designed to address key challenges in today's front office in capital markets, such as scalability, low latency, high throughput, flexibility and high performance together with resiliency. To download the joint white paper titled "BEA WebLogic Event Server Performance White Paper," visit www.bea.com/eventdrivensoa.

Building on a deep understanding of the BEA WebLogic Event Server's micro-architecture and its array of features, Lab49 has created a reference architecture demonstrating the real-time pricing of a portfolio of fixed income instruments. Through a visually compelling Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client application, the demo illustrates how the BEA WebLogic Event Server can model and process large volumes of complex events and perform pricing and risk computations using the proprietary analytics.

"With BEA's robust and extreme high-performance infrastructure capabilities and Lab49's industry expertise in delivering sophisticated financial applications, we are delivering a comprehensive framework for complex event processing (CEP) applications for the front office," said John Knightly, vice president of industry marketing at BEA Systems. "This new framework is designed to provide a high performance event-processing infrastructure that minimizes processing latency, allow developers to focus on delivering new and innovative business functionality and reduce the overall cost and time to market."

"Often, algorithmic trading is cited as the main use case for CEP," said Luke Flemmer, co-founder at Lab49. "However, at Lab49 we see a broader spectrum of use cases, all of which are ultimately part of the end to end solution for the front office. This is why we're excited to partner with BEA, who is helping support innovation and developing next generation technology that can help financial services organizations more quickly adapt to changing market conditions."

The core components of the BEA-Lab49 framework demonstrate:

  • Integration techniques to a variety of thick client and rich internet application applications such as WPF, Silverlight, Flex, Java among others.
  • Integration techniques to proprietary C/C++ analytic libraries.
  • Modeling front office applications as flexible complex event processing networks.
  • A design pattern for building flexible trading applications that can react to changes in the market during the day.

The framework, tested on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 Series Processors, achieved results of 1 million events per second at microsecond latencies, performance previously unachievable with standard Java. The core components of the framework are based on the technology jointly developed and optimized by Intel and BEA.

"Low latency and high rates of streaming data are critical for event driven applications in the front office and we are pleased with the performance results that BEA and Intel has achieved," said Nigel Woodward, financial services director at Intel. "Now with a framework in place for the real-time front office, financial services customers can realize the potential for complex event processing to help ease data proliferation in the enterprise, increase predictability of business drivers and help them become more agile and competitive."

BEA WebLogic Event Server is the first and only Java (non-JEE) application server for high-performance event-driven applications. With a built-in CEP engine, BEA WebLogic Event Server is designed to process complex, streaming events. For more information, visit www.bea.com./eventserver.

Lab49 builds advanced technology applications for the financial services industry and counts some of the world's largest financial institutions as clients. For more information, visit www.lab49.com/.

About BEA

BEA Systems Inc. is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. Information about how BEA helps customers build a Liquid Enterprise that transforms their business can be found at bea.com.

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Source: BEA Systems Inc.