Press Releases

StreamBase Addresses Growing Need For Real-Time Stream Processing

Seasoned Team and Blue Chip Funding Provide StreamBase with Early Advantages

BOSTON, MA – January 24, 2005 — StreamBase Systems, Inc., a new venture focused on creating software products to process, analyze, and act on real-time data within milliseconds of its arrival, was launched today by a team of seasoned data management experts and executives. The company today also announced that it has received $11 million in B round funding from Accel Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Highland Capital Partners bringing the total to date to $16 million. [See release "StreamBase Systems Secures $11 Million to Expand Sales and Marketing Activities," issued January 24, 2005]. The company's product will be introduced in February at the DEMO@15 conference.

The emerging real-time information environment is being fueled by an unprecedented increase in the amount of live data that needs to be understood and reacted to instantaneously. The traditional store and query model cannot address the needs of a world where in many cases information's value may exist for only a moment. StreamBase's Stream Processing Engine provides the only infrastructure able to support this growing class of problems.

"Stream processing is a one of the technologies that will have a lasting impact on the market," said Barry Morris, StreamBase's chief executive officer. "StreamBase is one of the most exciting data management companies I have been involved with or seen. It allows companies to drive dramatic top-line growth by taking advantage of the real-time data that is all around them. Based on initial feedback and adoption, we expect the impact on the marketplace to be very dramatic."

Financial services, telecommunications, government / military and industrial process control are some of the many markets that will benefit from stream processing. The volume of streaming data is growing at a tremendous rate. In the financial services market for example, the number of messages associated with electronic transactions has risen from 900 per second in 1997 to over 30,000 per second in 2004. This year, the number of messages per second is projected to be 62,000 and there is no reason to expect this trend to change. To receive the greatest value from this information, organizations need a fundamentally different infrastructure.

"Four years ago, there was a recognition that increasing amounts of streaming data were going to overwhelm current systems software," said Mike Stonebraker, one of the founders of StreamBase and the company's chief technology officer. "That recognition led to a research project at M.I.T. and Brown University to address the overall challenges of stream processing. Now it is clear that stream processing will do for streaming data what relational databases did for stored data."

To take advantage of streaming data's potential, several issues need to be addressed. The first is the tremendous — and growing — volume of streaming data and the need for applications to process, query, analyze and act on that information within milliseconds. The fluidity of real-time data — and the rapidly changing requirements for its use — requires the ability to create or modify applications in hours or days, rather than weeks or months. In addition, systems that process streaming data must integrate with the existing enterprise infrastructure, provide high availability operation and scale to meet the increasing data volume.

"Tools that sense-and-respond to real-time streams of messages will be increasingly important during the next five years," said Roy Schulte of Gartner Research. "Event processing engines represent an innovative technology that will be of interest to organizations looking to gain potential competitive advantage from instantly processing, analyzing and responding to real-time data on-the-fly."

Management Team

To develop its stream processing technology, StreamBase has assembled a strong team of industry veterans and academics to lead the company. In addition to Morris and Stonebraker, the management team includes:

• Bobbi Heath - vice president, engineering
• Bill Hobbib - vice president, marketing
• John Partridge - vice president, product management

Product Information

The company's core software was the result of more than four years of research, product engineering, and usability and performance testing, and features a high performance, enterprise-class server which can be configured via a graphical interface to solve demanding real-time processing and analytical problems. The initial version was delivered to early adopter customers in 2004 in the financial services industry.

StreamBase Systems will unveil this revolutionary product at DEMO@15 in February. This event has traditionally been the launch pad for some of the most advanced and exciting technologies over the past fifteen years.

About StreamBase

StreamBase Systems was founded in 2003 to address the processing demands of low latency, real-time computing. The first in a new breed of systems software, the StreamBase stream processing engine helps organizations in financial services, telecom and networking, government and military and other industries transform streaming data into competitive advantage through applications that deliver instantaneous response. Current customers include leading exchanges, hedge funds and investment firms, where applications require rapid execution of queries, analytics and actions using real-time streaming data. StreamBase is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts.

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