On the Coral8 and Aleri Merger
So it seems that there’s now one less company in the event processing space.
Aleri bought Coral8, in what is called by the vendors as a merge. One company less in CEP space is not necessarily a bad thing as the resulting Aleri is much larger. Which can be a good thing.
If someone had asked me last week which companies in the CEP space would merge – Aleri and Coral8 would been my last guess. My best guess would have been a dashboard focused BAM company acquiring an event processing company to get a good CEP processing engine.
This is a total surprise to me. I like both these companies and their approach to CEP. Both places have lots of nice people working for them too.
But I really don’t get this merger. Someone somewhere has a plan which they fail to communicate. I read the official merger announcements and read a lot of comments on blogs and on the web. But I still don’t get the point, and I would think I know more of these companies and their technology than the average Joe Programmer out there.
I’m pretty sure that there were a lot of intelligent people doing lots of thinking before they agreed on this one. So my guess is that there’s a clever plan for all this somewhere. I just don’t get it.
What I see is (was) two companies with similar approach to event processing and products which did more or less the same thing – if we look at the big picture. So why merge two companies which are so similar? Maybe there’s something in their marketing approaches and existing customer base that makes this a good idea?
From a technical point of view, I think the new merged Aleri will have tons of work in trying to figure out how to merge these two codebases. Something which is commonly incredibly difficult to do taken into account company politics, developer egos, and the fact that the companies are far away from each other. Something like this can take years to complete and consume insane amounts of resources. So, how are Aleri going to keep up the speed needed while doing this merge.
What code to keep, what to throw away? At the same time keeping those few customers happy and avoiding internal politics.
But hopefully Coral8 and Aleri can show us how a merger is done in an efficient way.
As I see it the real value of Coral8 is their CCL execution engine. Not the portal and other fancy graphical stuff added recently. Execution of CCL is what made Coral8 rock. So buying Coral8 and not using it would be total waste of efforts. To get a really good streaming data processing engine is more or less the only thing I see which would make this merger make sense. If, and now I’m speculating, the Coral8 engine was seen as superior to Aleri’s own one, I would make a great base to build on. The Coral8 engine is really good at processing data streams and probably the best data stream processing engine out there. Maybe complemented with a Splash module from Aleri?
Just some speculations, I’m excited to see what comes out of this.
Marco,
Why look for any motives in the merger other than this:
One company needed the money, another company was willing to provide it. No grand plan, no great scheme. Simply something that was necessitated by the current economic client.
That is indeed a good reason. But looking from Aleri’s point of view there might be other things to buy which might be more bang for the buck.
Such as?
Hi Marco,
Thanks for the nice comments, we feel the same way about ruleCore. Why – if executed properly 1+1 can sometimes =3. You are correct though, execution is key and trust me that we’ve spent a lot of time on that over the past months to ensure we can deliver on that. Imagine integrating the strengths of Aleri’s visual and procedural (i.e., SPLASH) authoring with Coral8′s CCL (focused more towards developers). Imagine one platform that supports everything that Aleri and Coral8 separately support today. Imagine combining Aleri’s strengths in financials with Coral8′s strengths in other markets. Imagine combining Aleri’s strengths in direct sales with Coral8′s strengths in partnerships and OEM relationships. Execution is key and many of us at Aleri are not new at this!
@marc
Well, last week I would guessed that one of these companies would be acquired by some player with focus on presentation, like dashboard or such. My last guess was a merger. If I would been asked what company one of these CEP companies would merge with, I would guessed a company doing traditional (database focused) operational intelligence tools. Not another CEP company.
@Jerry Baulier
I have a t-shirt that says “2+2=5, for extremely large values of 2″, maybe you need to pull off something like that
I would say they simply merged customer-bases. Apparently, the total number of customers is still relatively small. Business-wise it may be a simple attempt to increase number of customers, while decreasing the size of the organization. I am not sure about the code base — for the next two years they may simply need to maintain what they already have.
Another speculation on my part is that this could also be a way to build a bigger company which is easier to sell. More customers and a more complete solution portfolio.
@Jerry Baulier
That’s indeed something that would be very exciting to see. If you manage to execute this merger smoothly I’m pretty sure that the new Aleri will be a leader among the pure play CEP companies.
Hi Marco & Damir,
Marco, you win on this one by a large margin relative to Damir’s speculations:-). Our intent was to merge the strength of both companies and its customer bases so that we can provide an even more powerful converged solution that is forward compatible with both portfolios of today, and then to expand rapidly from there. As some have pointed out, it’s not easy to pull this off and execution is key, but I’m extremely confident in our combined abilities to pull this off in a painless way for our existing customer base, and yes I believe this will ensure our leadership position against those we normally compete against in the market. We are already down the path of not only planning, but even execution, and it’s exciting.
We’re not, however, concerned about being sold, we’re focused on being successful. Damir, when you say our combined customer bases is still relatively small – relative to what? If it’s relative to say IBM as a company, then of course. If it’s relative to pure-play CEP companies then I beg to differ, plus the whole intent of the merger and convergence path is to drastically increase market share. Another clarification Damir, is that we don’t currently have plans to (significantly) decrease the size of the organization, so perhaps surprisingly (to some) this is not a cost cutting strategy. Our strategy instead is to quickly move to a converged CEP product & portfolio so we can bring the best of both into one, and then to take ~half of our (rather large & extremely strong)40 person engineering team and invest them in broadening our portfolio in ways that our customers and prospects are asking for.
I hope this helped clarify things a bit. Please feel free to email me if you’d like to know more or have constructive feedback towards our convergence strategy or existing products.
regards,
jerry
jerry.baulier@aleri.com
Thanks a lot Jerry, I’ll stop speculating on the future of Coral8+Aleri for now and await eagerly to see future developments…