Software AG announced that it has executed an agreement with Progress Software to acquire Apama, the market leading platform for Complex Event Processing (CEP) and CEP-powered solutions.

Apama CEP allows organizations to correlate and analyze business activities across multiple data streams in real-time and take immediate action in response. The high performance Apama CEP platform together with Software AG's low-latency messaging and in-memory technology will enable customers to gain maximum value from real-time business data in any business area where sub-second response times to events are critical; such as fraud detection, capital markets trading or customer experience management. In addition, Apama CEP will enable customers to fully design, test, monitor and control the industrial internet to a new level of precision and at a new level of intelligence.

Under the deal Software AG will take over the Apama technology teams based primarily in Cambridge (UK), Bedford (USA) and Hyderabad (India). Also included are the global Apama sales and technical teams which serve their extensive customer base in financial services, communications and other markets. Software AG will maintain the Apama product brand given the high brand recognition of Apama in the CEP market. Software AG will also continue and expand Apama's industry and solution focus areas, including capital markets trading, risk and surveillance, as well as more broadly location and context-aware customer experience management and fraud prevention.

"Data can lose its value in an instant", said Software AG's CEO Terracotta and Member of the Group Executive Board, Robin Gilthorpe. "Software AG's big data technology focuses on empowering enterprises to react to complex data while that data is still live and while a reaction still has significant business impact - whether preventing fraud, increasing sales or even in saving lives. This acquisition is a major step in delivering on our strategy of empowering enterprises to derive meaningful business insights and value from big data".

Software AG's big data strategy focuses on delivering real-time insights from any big data source to any type of device for immediate action. It combines in-memory data management with event stream processing and messaging to deliver real-time business insights. Software AG's big data platform will enable a new class of applications that easily adapt to emerging use cases and new data sets. These goals have not been achievable using traditional disk-based data management approaches. Apama is a low-latency CEP platform that fully complements Software AG's product portfolio.

Dr. John Bates, Apama co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Progress Software stated: "Both Progress and Software AG are committed to making this transition as seamless as possible for customers and to continue providing them with the highest levels of support to which they've become accustomed.  I will be joining Software AG once the transaction is completed and am personally committed to this transition."

This acquisition is consistent with Software AG's focus on expanding its dynamically growing business line for integration and process software (Business Process Excellence) in order to help customers digitize their enterprises around the "four forces": mobile, cloud, social collaboration and big data. Software AG generated about €547 million in the Business Process Excellence segment alone in fiscal 2012. Licensing revenue in this business segment increased by 19 percent year-on-year in Q1 2013.

Highlights

• The acquisition of Apama is an important step in implementing Software AG's strategy of enabling the digital enterprise
• Apama will enable enterprises to maximize the value of their big data through proactively responding to business opportunities identified from the continuous analysis and correlation of  business activities across multiple data streams
• It will also enable customers to fully integrate the industrial internet (Industry 4.0), analyzing the massive amounts of real-time operational data from intelligent machines to make precise, real-time decisions 
• Software AG  will leverage and expand Apama's leadership in customizable CEP-powered solutions in capital markets (algorithmic trading, risk and market surveillance), telecommunications and supply chain & logistics
• With this acquisition Software AG  confirms its focus on dynamic growth for its BPE business division

The Apama Event Processing Platform is a complete design and deployment environment for CEP applications. From graphical design tools to research and back-testing utilities, the complex event processing (CEP) platform provides analysts, developers and administrators with a full lifecycle design center that is optimized for CEP solutions. Apama is the leading CEP technology used by capital markets participants in trading, risk and compliance. The Apama platform offers a flexible and powerful platform for developing event-driven applications.