Readers should first note that the competitor makes a number of claims which are not actually supported by facts or independent published references. For example:
“Mark believes Coral8 has significantly lower…”
“Mark believes the Coral8 is fundamentally better suited for…”
“Mark thinks Coral8 has a much richer set of…”

The facts are very different. Due to time constraints, just a few are highlighted below:

Latency and Performance: StreamBase, like a number of other CEP products, achieves sub-millisecond latency. No independent tests have been run comparing the latency of current versions of StreamBase Enterprise Edition vs Coral8; therefore, it is unclear what, if any, data Coral8 thinks is out there in the public domain to substantiate their claims. Coral8 is, however, correct in conceding that “StreamBase is at least comparable to Coral8 in its throughput.” A benchmark run by a third-party consultant last year showed StreamBase running at more than 500,000 messages/second on a 2.5 Ghz AMD Opteron™ CPU for a market data monitoring application. No comparable test results have been published by Coral8 or other competitors to date.

Complex Queries, Pattern Recognition, and Simple Queries: StreamBase has been handling some of the most complex queries and applications across financial services, government intelligence, Web/Internet businesses, and the telecomm/networking sectors since well before Coral8 was publicly launched as a company. StreamBase’s track record is proven over a customer base that spans a far broader range of industries and complex mission-critical applications than that of Coral8 and virtually all other competitors as well. The claims that StreamBase can only handle simple queries are simply unsubstantiated.

Graphical User Interface vs Text Language: StreamBase today offers customers a choice of two development paradigms–programming StreamSQL applications using our workflow GUI or using the text version of the language—and developers can also build an app with the workflow GUI and convert it to text for subsequent enhancement or editing. Coral8 offers only one paradigm. This criticism is reinforced by a recent Infoworld review of Coral8 which said, “On the downside, Coral8 offers none of the graphical development features found in competitors such as StreamBase. For an application that is otherwise extremely usable, this is a conspicuous oversight.”
http://www.infoworld/article/07/04/02/14TCcoral_1.html

Moreover, the post (above) about Ab Initio is correct. As anyone familiar with the ETL tools space can attest, these tools offer a very powerful workflow GUI that handles a high degree of complexity, but also allow developers to bring in custom code or drop into a scripting language if necessary to do something the GUI might not allow readily. Customers mostly use the StreamBase GUI because they can build VERY POWERFUL, COMPLEX applications with it that run blindly fast. They can drop into the text editor if they wish, they can create custom Java or C++ operators/functions, and StreamBase Studio includes a number of other tools that make it easy to back-test applications on stored data, debug applications, optimize performance, and interface with input and output feeds. Anyone who wishes to check out the fantastic StreamBase development environment can do so by downloading the Developer Edition of StreamBase at: http://www.streambase.com/developers.

In summary, we appreciate the chance to clarify any misunderstandings on the part of competitors who may be unfamiliar with StreamBase, and to also discuss why StreamBase is the leading software for high performance Complex Event Processing.

It all depends on what the GUI can or can’t easily do. Coral8’s claims certainly include both that a language is better than a GUI (in the case of query specification) and that a GUI is better than a language (in the case of setting up clustering).

The devil is in the details.

Best,

CAM