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40 Mark Palmer

    Chief Executive Officer
    StreamBase Systems
    [37]

    The number on StreamBase Systems’ April software release, Version 7, attests to how far its complex-event-processing technology has come since former University of California, Berkeley, professor Michael Stonebraker founded the Lexington, Massachusetts, company in 2003. But that’s just tech talk. A truer measure of StreamBase’s capital markets impact is the company it keeps — customers and partners — and the list keeps getting longer. Clients such as BlueCrest Capital Management, CME Group and RBC Capital Markets have deployed CEP to deal with massive amounts of trading and risk data in real time. In the three years since Mark Palmer, 45, became CEO, the technology has gained wider, almost mainstream, acceptance even as processing speeds and performance levels continue to advance. “The question is no longer ‘What is CEP?’ ” says Palmer, who previously ran Progress Software Corp.’s Apama division (see John Bates, No. 38). “It’s ‘Which one do I choose?’ ” In what Palmer terms “a big turning point” for global adoption, Thomson Reuters in May said it would put StreamBase CEP applications within reach of traders on its high-performance Elektron network. StreamBase is also embedded in SunGard Data Systems’ Valdi Order Validator for pretrade risk management and in various compliance and surveillance systems. “Important applications like this show how CEP is spreading,” Palmer says.