Smith was also named a Rising Star in CRN’s Women in the Channel feature in 2007, as well as being named Channel Chief multiple times by the publication. In her position, she has initiated and managed key programs for empowering ISVs through business model consultation and other enablement efforts. Her contributions have helped Progress grow its SaaS business by 20 percent this year. Through Smith’s leadership, Progress continues to develop services and applications that add more value to the ISV ecosystem and allow partners to work more closely with Progress to develop impactful business and application deployment strategies.
Mrs. Smith and the other Top 100 Women in the Channel will be featured in the July issue of CRN and the Women of the Channel Winter Workshop conference that will be held in December.

• When: Tuesday, August 10^th at 11 AM  EST
• Where:  InterContinental Hotel, Boston, MA, or webcast http://www.wsw.com/webcast/canaccord2/prgs/ available online for 90 days
• What: Canaccord Genuity investor conference
• Why: Progress Software Corporation to discuss financial overview

For background information about Progress Software’s financial performance, please refer to the most recent Quarterly Earnings announcement. This release and other information relevant to investors can be found at the following URL: http://investors.progress.com/.

Prudential UK used the FUSE ESB open source technology to implement a core part of its back-end infrastructure. The initial phase includes a suite of reusable web services that calculate projected returns for different annuity products. These services connect to diverse back-end systems including databases, WebSphere MQ, and third party services. Building on this success, Prudential has begun adopting the Progress FUSE Message Broker® product for high performance, reliable messaging.

Prudential selected the FUSE ESB product because of its robustness, scalability, and because of its support of OSGI, a standards-based framework for Java development. OSGi provided them with a clean way to manage service lifecycle, dependencies and versioning, and resulted in simplified, high performance architecture.

For more information on Progress FUSE ESB open source technology please go to fusesource.com.

According to the findings, 59 percent of financial services professionals believe that high frequency trading is beneficial to the market, with respondents citing increased liquidity and tightened spreads as the primary benefits. Only 18 percent believe that high frequency trading is dangerous or threatens market integrity. So while respondents generally do have a favorable opinion of HFT, they recognize that increased transparency is critical in preventing abuse and anomalous market conditions. In fact, 68 percent of respondents believe that the flash crash that derailed the financial markets in May 2010 could have been prevented.

Other key findings include:

• Just 36% of respondents believe that additional / stronger prohibitive regulations are needed to effectively deal with market abuse and anomalous market conditions.
• 56% of believe that sponsored access, a highly-debated practice where traders use the market participant identification of a sponsoring brokers to trade directly on electronic exchanges, should be managed with some level of mandated pre-trade risk checks, while 31% think the benefits outweigh the risk with sponsored access and should be freely allowed in all forms including the highly disputed naked access.  Only 13% believe that all forms of sponsored access should be banned altogether.

Most recently, Dr. Bates was appointed to the newly established Technology Advisory Committee for the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The Committee’s mission is to keep the CFTC informed about technologies that will help the agency better oversee the derivatives markets, including market surveillance and high frequency trading. Last week, the committee held its first meeting to discuss the future of HFT and algo trading.

John Wilmes has 16 years experience developing solutions for the communications industry, and is member co-chair of the TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM) and Information Framework (SID) Technical Programs. He is an active member of other key TM Forum technical programs, and is driving the build-out of low-level eTOM processes and their mapping to SID entities. John also co-authored two books: “Application Integration using the SID” (2008) and “Business Transformation with TM Forum Solution Frameworks and SOA” (2009).

The TM Forum is the world’s leading industry association comprising more than 700 corporate members in 195 countries.  It is focused on enabling best-in-class IT for service providers in the communications, media and cloud service markets. The TM Forum provides business-critical industry standards and expertise to facilitate the creation, delivery and monetization of digital services. The Distinguished Fellow Award is given to members who have:

• A lengthy and sustained record of service to the industry and to TM Forum;
• Contributed to the technical excellence of the TM Forum;
• Helped to materially advance the OSS/BSS industry;
• Demonstrated leadership and teamwork;
• Shown a commitment to helping advance the principles of the TM Forum in the communications industry; and,
• A proven track record of achievements and accomplishment.

Dr. John Bates joins the TAC as one of the world’s foremost experts on capital markets technology. Prior to becoming CTO at Progress Software, he was the co-founder and president of Apama, the pioneering Complex Event Processing (CEP) software provider, which was acquired by Progress in April 2005.

Dr. John Bates is a respected expert, frequent author and speaker on capital markets technology, with a specific focus on CEP, cross-asset algorithmic and high frequency trading, liquidity aggregation, smart order routing, market surveillance, and distributed computing systems.

Dr. John Bates will join the first meeting of the CFTC TAC, which will take place today, Wednesday, July 14 in Washington, DC.  Dr. Bates has authored and will submit a whitepaper on high frequency and algorithmic trading, which will be a key topic at this inaugural meeting.

Sacco has over 25 years of global field management experience in the financial sector and is accomplished in developing organizations to meet increasing growth. In recent years, he successfully built a Capital Markets alliance eco-system at Sun Financial Services and doubled revenues during 2008 and 2009. While at Mercator Software, Sacco built a successful Financial Services sales force.

For ISVs deploying a SaaS application, Amazon EC2 often provides them with a low cost hosting option for targeting new SMB accounts, however, navigating the range of pricing models can be confusing.

In addition to providing consultative services aimed at assuring each partner selects the most appropriate hosting offering for each application, Progress also developed a complete support system for ISVs looking to understand how to operate and rapidly deploy applications in the cloud.  The community site provides resources ranging from creating a first Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to associating an elastic IP address to basic “Getting to the Cloud” instructions.

OpenEdge is a leading SaaS Platform for ISVs and Business Service Providers looking to simplify service development and delivery for the cloud resulting in greater Operational Responsiveness.  Features and enhancements include: delivering applications that comply with latest security regulations, simplifying the deployment of applications via the Web, increasing visibility into end-to-end business operations and accelerating the delivery of service-based applications.

More details on the OpenEdge SaaS platform are available at: http://www.progress.com/openedge/products/openedge/

Today, Progress Software empowers a community of more than 1,500 application partners offering over 4,000 applications that serve 6 million users worldwide. Our combined customers are able to “make progress” by reaching the highest level of business performance, delivering deployment flexibility for public and private clouds and achieving the industry’s lowest cost of ownership.

The new suite of algorithms includes custom options investment strategies including butterfly and condor spreads, delta hedging strategies and volume weighted average price (VWAP) execution algorithms. Each of these strategies was developed by Agora based on specific customer demand.

Effective and secure trading is a key component in sustaining confidence in Agora’s clients. With the continuous threat of strong competition, brokers have to offer their clients new strategies continuously to help them stay one step ahead of their competitors.

The new version includes new functionality and across-the-board feature enhancements that deliver significant improvements in performance and productivity. As a result, developers can enable quantitative and systematic traders to more rapidly create trading strategies and platforms that are highly competitive and differentiated, as well as create highly flexible market surveillance and risk management applications. Most importantly, these enhancements help developers significantly improve the way traders can research, design and implement their own strategies.

The new Apama Capital Markets Foundation is built in the form of easily configurable building blocks and includes the following capabilities:

1. A new market data architecture, which provides an increase in performance and flexibility in the processing of cross-asset market data. The architecture makes optimal use of the patented Apama parallel event processing engine that can scale to hundreds of thousands of market data updates per second. The new market data architecture can channel that data into an application as useable information with sustained sub-millisecond latency end-to-end (from the adapter’s receipt of data through to information being available to the application);
2. Native support for new order types and features to enrich application functionality and enhance usability for the developer of quant trading applications. The developer, using the Apama Capital Markets Foundation, can now handle natively disparate pricing information and data feeds that exchanges present (including BBO, Market-By-Price, Market-By-Order, RFQ and Trades) and transform them into a single, customizable format based on what the quant trader uses;
3. Expanded analytics including integration with additional third party analytics solutions and plug-ins (i.e., Quantlib and Matlab);
4. A risk firewall – a fundamental component of the Apama Capital Markets Foundation – that provides trading and risk management applications with the ability to deliver pre-trade risk management in real-time. The risk firewall’s capabilities include pre-empting trades that exceed the firm’s market risk tolerance and intercepting so-called “fat finger” trades. Such capabilities are critical to trading effectively in today’s volatile markets and are particularly useful as a complement to high frequency trading and to provide a pre-trade risk management capability for sponsored access;
5. An improved exchange simulator, including a full matching engine implementation, provides the ability to:
   • Better perform advanced back-testing of strategies prior to live implementation; and
   • Create internal liquidity pools;
6. New latency measurement functionality.  This unique capability allows developers to measure the latency between each step within the application code of their strategies. This enables them to better identify optimization opportunities in the strategies they are creating and help traders improve the performance of their applications; and
7. New sample code and trading strategies to get started.

The Apama Capital Markets Foundation, as its name implies, provides the foundation for a growing portfolio of solution accelerators – pre-built customizable solutions – that include algorithmic trading, market surveillance and monitoring, and FX trading and eCommerce.

The new generation Apama Capital Markets Foundation is shipping now.

The Progress Apama complex event processing platform is the leading solution for high velocity capital markets applications for building sophisticated multi-asset applications for low latency trading, risk and compliance. It is used by international banks (for example, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, ING and Bank of China), market regulators (for example, the UK Financial Services Authority [FSA]) and trading platforms like Turquoise).