eFinancialCareers

You may not have heard of it, but IT professionals would do well to position themselves in the blast zone for a complex event processing explosion.

Complex event processing (CEP) is most commonly used in algorithmic trading, where it looks for possible market patterns and acts on them. But experts predict a move to the mainstream as banks and hedge funds look for speedier, more intelligent software for transactions.

The bad news is that because of its current low profile, software developers can’t find skilled staff to fill the roles. And there is likely to be no shortage of roles in future – research from US-based consultancy Aite Group predicts revenues from CEP will rise from US$49m in 2006, to just shy of US$1bn by 2010.

“We face challenges recruiting for the capital markets pre-sales team,” says Richard Bentley, head of technical services at event-processing provider Apama. “This is because we set the bar high and look for three characteristics – domain knowledge of front-office trading environment, the basic pre-sales skills (presentation and communication skills) and, thirdly, the technical skills.”

Apama is also struggling to find people for solution consultant roles – those who implement the software for clients and deal with any trouble-shooting issues. There might be a shortage of skilled staff but, ironically, the software developers in this space – such as Aleri, Apama, Streambase and Corel8 – are competing for talent against the investment banks and hedge funds they sell their products to.

Still, as CEP skills aren’t appearing on CVs, there’s no point in advertising for them. Bentley says: “There is no purchase with trying to recruit people who only have CEP background. Instead, we are looking for people with broad technical background – those with an understanding of distributed computing, real-time computing and performance critical computing.”

A pre-sales executive with around six years’ experience can expect to earn £150k OTE. Meanwhile, a solutions consultant with the right skill set can take home £100k a year.

Bentley’s advice is to get in early: “As the CEP term becomes more pervasive, and becomes more adopted outside algo trading boundaries, the number of jobs that are being advertised, or have some sort of CEP label, will increase significantly.”

Indeed, Jeff Wootton, vice president of Aleri, said in Financial News that CEP had moved out of infancy and into adolescence, after years of vendors struggling to educate firms as to its many uses. Still, of the many financial IT headhunters we contacted, hardly any had heard of it, showing the journey to the mainstream is still some way off.