Companies involved in automated trading, electronic marketplaces, Web-based customer self-service and Internet retailing must deal with an ever-growing volume of high-speed event data to track the state of their operations. Efficient and reliable processing of complex data streams—from financial market data to security events to click-through data from Web sites—is increasingly crucial to businesses that want to stay competitive, enhance customer service and manage risk.

Coral8, Inc., based in Mountain View, California, offers software that provides the infrastructure for corporate IT teams or independent software vendors to handle the real-time processing and analysis of multiple high-volume data streams—also known as complex event processing (CEP). The Coral8 solution includes a robust processing engine that is easy to incorporate into existing and custom applications as well as a high-level SQL-based programming language that requires little or no learning curve for developers.

Coral8 customers include companies that have previously been hardcoding CEP functionality into applications—a costly approach that lacks flexibility and scalability—as well as businesses that are building entirely new applications that need CEP features.

Built natively in the C and C++ programming languages, Coral8 is available for a number of platforms, but it is optimized for use with Microsoft® Windows®—both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. With a Microsoft .NET interface and a developer tool called Coral8 Studio that has a native Windows look and feel, Coral8 also offers optimizations for products such as Microsoft SQL Server™, Microsoft Office Excel® and Microsoft Message Queuing.

Developers can download a full-featured version of the Coral8 product from the company’s Web site for use in development and testing. Only when they are ready to deploy their application do they obtain a license for the Coral8 software, on a per-core basis. Coral8 not only supplies its software up front but also offers support and maintenance during and after the development process, free adapters and templates, and 35 sample applications from real Coral8 customers, including applications for financial metrics, power grid maintenance and network security.

In addition to dramatically reducing the cost of including event processing in applications, Coral8 also offers levels of speed and performance that far exceed what most enterprises have been able to achieve with their previous CEP solutions. Coral8’s sophisticated Continuous Computation Language (CCL) allows developers to express complex operations such as matching, merging and correlating data from multiple streams or identifying event patterns in or across multiple streams in a simplified fashion, thereby greatly increasing developer productivity and enabling sophisticated real-time applications. Coral8 can process and analyze data from within the corporate firewall as well as data from outside sources such as partners and the Internet. The Coral8 engine also offers the continuous availability that 24x7 environments—including unattended ones—require.

Coral8’s customers rely on its CEP functionality to handle a broad array of data processing tasks. Sallie Mae, the leading U.S. provider of student loans, uses Coral8 to monitor session data from users of its Web site so that it can improve the online process of applying for a loan or opening an account and thereby reduce the number of inquiries to its call centers. Other customers include a pipeline monitoring company that uses Coral8 to issue real-time reports based on monitoring data sent over the Web, a company that has integrated Coral8 into the patient-tracking software it sells to healthcare providers, and a transportation company that uses Coral8 to continuously monitor and analyze GPS, fuel, radio-frequency and other sensor data from its fleet of more than 10,000 trucks.

The CEP market is fairly new, and the use of Microsoft technologies has been instrumental in Coral8’s early success. “Microsoft tools were a major reason why we were able to seize this market opportunity,” says Coral8 CEO Terry Cunningham. “We made a conscious decision from day one that we were going to be native on the Microsoft platform. A lot of our developers were familiar with the Microsoft development environment, and our customers wanted the Windows look and feel.”

Guidance from Microsoft product groups and Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team has also been crucial for Coral8. “Microsoft provided tremendous support and guidance through each phase of our startup life cycle,” says Mark Tsimelzon, Coral8’s founder, president and chief technology officer. “We have partnered with over a dozen leading technology vendors, and none offer what Microsoft provides to up-and-coming independent software businesses. We not only received introductions to key Microsoft product organizations but benefited from the Emerging Business Team’s deep knowledge about Microsoft’s vast product portfolio and the company’s road map for the future.”

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© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Excel, SharePoint, SQL Server, Visual Studio and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Document published December 2007