forex market

An SME is not big, mature, resource-rich, capital-comfortable, or very knowledgeable about what CRM system it wants. Vendors identify the mid-market range from a low end of $50 million to a high end of $1 billion (USD). Individuals have multiple roles in an SME and their business processes are underdeveloped, with best practices often nonexistent. They view CRM as modular versus enterprise-wide and their CRM implementation should be accelerated and at a fixed price.

Some exceptions however exist within this business space for companies that have implemented best practices and incrementally have improved demarcation of job descriptions. The largest vendors address this space more effectively than they do the typical SME space, but they still do not have a clear understanding of the difference between these organizations and large enterprises. The processes embedded in good SME CRM software applications have to be flexible enough to recognize constantly shifting roles and responsibilities. Often to be able to use CRM functionalities, mid-sized companies have to shift how they do business.

Today's small and mid-sized companies all have something in common. They are running on tight budgets while still sharing some of the bigger players' primary needs. The primary needs:

* Empowering their sales forces and customer service teams to better communicate with customers
* Allowing front-office employees to better perform collaborative work, thus enhancing team-selling opportunities
* Delivering information where it is needed and when it is needed
* Increasing efficiency and productivity while still being able to reduce costs

The SME market diverges from the larger-sized arena particularly in its lack of ability to sustain application or integration complexity and overdue return on investment (ROI). In other words, these companies need affordability, predictability, simplicity and instant value, along with a comprehensive application. The SME market diverges from the large enterprise not only from a functional standpoint but also in the way it adopts and implements technology. The formula is complex but it characterizes what is considered as today's market potential.

As the demand for small and medium-sized enterprises grows and outshines the large implementations, the market gets crowded with SME application providers. The SME market potential has CRM vendors and integrators of all sizes and shapes drooling. The market is growing at the rate of 13 percent per year, which is considerably faster than large enterprise growth.

TEC reviewed the PeopleSoft Preconfigured Mid-Market Solutions because it has taken an important share in PeopleSoft's overall customer base. With over 1,100 customers from the small and medium enterprise (SME) market, The Pleasanton, California, PeopleSoft (NASDAQ: PSFT), not only establishes its market dominance along with Siebel (NASDAQ: SEBL) and SAP (NASDAQ: SAP) as an enterprise solution provider, but also demonstrates its capability to cater to the mid-sized space and step on the traditional SME vendors' toes. PeopleSoft's strategy in tapping into the potential of the mid-market is based on targeting its Preconfigured Mid-Market Solution to the upper layer of the market. In a recent interview, PeopleSoft mid-market vice president and general manager, Jeffrey Read, defined the mid-market "as a tale of two markets: companies with simple business requirements and companies with sophisticated business requirements."

Like large enterprises, sophisticated SMEs have similar requirements with regards to functionality, business processes workflow, and integration. The principal difference comes from size. PeopleSoft is strongly aiming at this portion of the market by offering a preconfigured application with a data model, which maps out the special needs of the SME niche market place.

Progress Apama became part of Progress Software via the acquisition of the former Apama LTD in April of 2005. Apama is the core technology foundation for Progress’ initiatives in CEP and the company’s go-to-market initiatives that leverage that CEP platform in capital markets for the following “daily bread” actions: algorithmic trading, market aggregation, real-time pricing, smart order routing, and market surveillance.

Prior to its acquisition by Progress Software, Apama had a few dozen customers in London, New York, and Boston. Today, however, after leveraging the global parent’s infrastructure, Apama is marketed and sold in all the major financial centers in the world.

Apama was founded in 1999 in Cambridge (UK), by John Bates and Giles Nelson. Fellow Cantabrigians and CEP visionaries Bates and Nelson are co-holders of the patents on Apama’s core technology, which is a commercially-productized expression of their efforts to create a platform for the unique characteristics of “event-based” applications.

Originally, Apama had set out to try and resolve a number of telecommunications-based real-time mobility issues, but had then realized that there were additional commercial opportunities in a wide range of environments. As a result, the company has historically focused on financial markets and specifically financial trading systems where real-time event-based trading systems are in high demand.

The capital markets segment has indeed proven to be an early proof point for the Apama CEP platform. Apama’s design philosophy and architecture were intended to provide a platform that allows traders to quickly develop and deploy distinctive proprietary strategies that exploit these opportunities and mitigate risks.

In addition to the above-mentioned CEP applications in capital markets, other current (or future) uses in the segment are the following: commodities trading, bonds trading and pricing, foreign exchange (Forex) aggregation and algorithms, futures exchange and options algorithms, equities trading, cross-asset trading, real-time risk management, broker algorithms, news-driven algorithms, and so on.

In plain English, CEP lands itself well to any environment that treats any business update as an “event.” Such organizations want to enable users to rapidly define event-based business rules to identify patterns indicating opportunities and threats to the business. These encapsulated rules (either as “if-then” statements or structural query language [SQL] statements) are loaded into a real-time computing (RTC) CEP engine.

The correlating engine is permanently connected to multiple event sources and destinations (with volumes of events and related data points) and offers analysis and response within an extremely low latency period. Events can be captured and preserved in time-order for a historical pattern analysis and root-cause analysis (RCA).

Given that algorithmic trading in capital markets was one of the first real-life applications of CEP, let’s translate the above general CEP principles into trading terms. The continuing digitization of financial market data and the advancement of electronic market access has created a market environment in which competitive differentiation amongst financial service firms rests with split-second algorithmic execution that can exploit minuscule and momentary advantages in price, time, and available liquidity.

To that end, a trading company will treat any market update as an “event” and will enable users to rapidly build quantitative algorithms (based on their vast experience and know-how) to identify trading opportunities and risk breaches. Germane trading rules are then loaded into a trading system that offers real-time analysis and response with a latency measured in milliseconds.

The trading system is permanently connected to a number of relevant market data sources, news-feeds, and trading venues (exchanges). Finally, events can be captured and preserved in time-order for backtesting and digital forensics analysis.

In summary, the drivers for CEP adoption are the following:

* Applications with high throughput and latency requirements. Such requirements from market trends such as higher velocity business event flows, more voluminous (and yet shorter-lived) transactions, and rapidly changing market conditions. These trends in turn pose the challenges onto customers in terms of how to detect opportunities and threats in real-time, and how to show the health of their business; and
* The need for rapid software development and customization, and increasing application complexity (temporal and/or spatial logic, real-time analytics, etc.). The customers’ challenge in this regard is how to accelerate the deployment of new capabilities.