In a press release yesterday morning and following an active rumor mill, Sybase announced its acquisition of Aleri. This comes less than a year after Aleri itself acquired CEP competitor Coral8, which we talked about in a blog last year. Don Deloach will be leaving Aleri and no other terms of the deal were announced, nor any specifics regarding this year's Aleri / Coral8 platform changes, code named Ohio. That leaves StreamBase and Esper as the last independents.

Sybase now has a solid CEP engine, good extended financial services client base and a more complete offering. Sybase continues to make deeper inroads into financial services and capital markets and snapping up Aleri only increases chances of success for the vendor's plans. Aleri gets more firepower behind their initiatives. If anything, it might push Ohio out quicker and make it more robust then what Aleri had originally envisioned.

There are rumors that suggest Aleri was motivated because of cash concerns, but that seems suspect. They were able to pull off the Coral8 deal less than a year ago and I trust Don had Aleri well positioned for its longer term strategy to build out/integrate Coral8. It could be as simple as Aleri investors seeing an opportunity for a payout or Sybase wanting to keep Aleri from others. Not to mention the deal was an asset purchase agreement, so Sybase is only taking the good stuff and not dealing with the liabilities. Sure there's a chance Sybase was picking up some distressed assets, but it's unlikely Aleri would want to do this due to potential lawsuits that often come about with creditors in those situations. The other advantage to asset purchases is this type of transaction can happen much quicker and with fewer regulatory questions.

Where can we expect Sybase to leverage Aleri?

·         The Sybase RAP-The Trading Edition, will get enhancements from this. Note that they were already using Coral8 code for Sybase's CEP technology in the first place.

·         Pull in Aleri's real time risk monitor for Sybase's risk analytics platform

·         Sybase will liekly extend Aleri's Liquidity solution into its analytics

·         Sybase gets a nice front end GUI out of the deal as well

·         Sybase's RFID software will pull in Aleri's RFID and Sensor solutions. While it's not a financial focused solution, I would think ties-ins like this only made the deal that much more compelling for Sybase.

Interestingly enough folks will begin to ask what happens to Aleri's existing customers and this is something we've seen before. If there are any Aleri client qualms regarding the Sybase deal, Streambase has quickly offered an amnesty deal to Sybase-Aleri-Coral8 customers. We've seen this before when Coral8 was picked up too. To be honest,  I would not expect there to be too much Aleri client fallout from this news. It' in Sybase's best interests to fully support and service the Aleri suite of solutions and they intend to do just that.  

Will Sybase extend Aleri technology into other areas, maybe its Financial Fusion server solution and corporate banking, for example?  Sybase is no longer limited to where it can extend the Coral8 and Aleri technology. So I fully expect Sybase to take advantage of the solution and extend it to other financial service applications as well as industries. Additionally this gives Sybase an independent CEP solution to market as well. Overall this is a nicely structured deal by Sybase and a strong pickup.