Print
Email
Print Edition StoriesFriday, February 12, 2010
StreamBase's Palmer pitches real-time tech to global power brokers
By Galen Moore
MHT's Galen Moore: N.E. firms target individual carbon footprints
MHT's Galen Moore: Six Mass. tech firms head to world economic forum
New England prepared to leverage smart grid expertise
A career in Route 128’s unsexy enterprise software industry suddenly took a turn into the limelight last month when world power brokers hosted Mark Palmer, CEO of StreamBase Systems Inc., for a week in the Swiss resort city of Davos.
StreamBase, a Lexington-based software company, was one of 26 technology pioneers invited to participate in the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, which took place at the end of January. Palmer, a Sandwich native, recalls sitting down to lunch with an official responsible for setting nuclear policy in the United Kingdom.
“Hi, I’m Mark Palmer. I’m from Boston,” he said.
“She said, ‘Oh yeah, I run the whole nuclear thing for the U.K.’”
Heads of state and titans of international finance are interested in Palmer because StreamBase does complex event processing (CEP) — software designed to analyze business data in real-time. Wall Street is now accustomed to using CEP in high-frequency trading systems that make money when they beat the market by fractions of a second. U.S. government agencies have used the technology to monitor air traffic and people moving in and out of the country. Now, as real-time information services like Twitter become mainstream, leaders in other industries are wrapping their heads around treating data not as facts stored in spreadsheets, but as a constant flood of information that can be mined almost instantaneously.
The casino industry is the latest — an example Palmer found fitting at the Davos power summit, amid an Alpine setting suitable for a James Bond movie.
One casino-industry StreamBase customer has installed optical character recognition under the card chutes to track what cards are played, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) in all the chips.
“It knows which players and how they’re betting,” he said. “If you’re betting against trend and consistently winning, you might be doing some card-counting or player-dealer collusion. If you’re betting against trend and losing, then they might send you a new drink.”
Palmer declined to comment on whether StreamBase gives such customers an unfair advantage. The company was founded in 2003 out of an MIT project involving the database pioneer and serial entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker. Since then, StreamBase has raised at least $37 million from investors, including Lexington-based Highland Capital Partners, California-based Accel Partners, Wellesley-based Bessemer Venture Partners and In-Q-Tel, the venture investing arm of the CIA.
The company has more than 75 employees, and about 100 customers. Palmer declined to disclose StreamBase’s revenue, except to say it is under $50 million. Earnings grew by 100 percent in 2009 over 2008, and the company expects to reach profitability in 2010, he said.
Formerly StreamBase’s chief operating officer, Palmer, 44, took over the corner office in September 2008. Before StreamBase, he was a vice president and general manager at Bedford-based Progress Software Corp. (Nasdaq: PRGS), where he managed the company’s acquisition of Apama Ltd., a U.K.-based complex event processing software company. Before Progress, Palmer was a product manager at IONA Technologies, an Irish software company acquired by Progress in 2008.
It was at IONA that Desmond Pieri encountered Palmer. Pieri was an interim executive, running a division that produced enterprise integration software, in which Palmer was product manager. He said Palmer’s skills developed there are what has set him up to be a good CEO.
“I think if Vegas took bets on people who were going to be future CEOs I’d bet on good product managers like Mark,” he said. “You’re responsible for everything, but you have authority over nothing. Nobody works for you. You’ve got to worry about all those things, but you’ve also got to work with those other groups. You can’t command them.”
Palmer went beyond the standard product manager role, Pieri said, distinguishing himself as an executive by helping make the decision to shut down his own division, which had come into IONA as part of an earlier acquisition. “He said, ‘We should recommend that this not go forward,’ ” Pieri recalls. “ ‘Yeah, it’s going to put us all out of work, but it’s the right thing to do.’”
Palmer started his career in 1987 as a software developer at Digital Equipment Corp., building financial trading systems.
For banking and government customers, real-time began catching on in IT in the mid 1990s, as networks became robust and widespread enough to make real-time data collection useful. Before that time, networks were private and constrained, if they existed at all. Now, they encompass global data sources.
For example, Orbitz Worldwide Inc. (NYSE: OWW) uses StreamBase to monitor customer activity and intervene with customer service when a Web user appears to be unable to find a desired flight. For now, Palmer said selling the world on an emerging technology is still an uphill battle. But in the coming decade, Palmer believes monitoring real-time data will become mainstream in IT systems, like supply chain monitoring, that are used across all industries. StreamBase aims to become the “Oracle Corp. of moving information,” he said.
“So much of the information about what’s going on in the world is being transmitted in real-time,” Palmer said. “It doesn’t do you much good any more to store that all into a database and figure out what happened now, next month. You have to figure it out today, right now. That’s the changing nature of business.”
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
