Quote from bmferguson:
I'm a Quantitative Strategist at a hedge fund, and an Apama user. I think what makes it "institutional" is that it is extremely powerful and flexible (but therefore quite complex). It was apparently developed to gather and process intelligence in real-time for the "war on terror"....whatever! I probably only use about 10% of it's capability. I use it to capture level 2 tick data, feed a predictive engine I've connected to it that''s written in Java, and run the execution strategies to act on the generated signals. There are about 6 steep learning curves to climb, but now that I've done it, I can make changes to my strategies very quickly. The biggest mistake I made was doing it all myself. I would imagine that it's better with a team of at least 3 people. I'm very happy with the product, but don't have much hair left.