Dr Mark D. Spiteri

BSc PhD (Cantab)

Hi, welcome to my website.

Professional Background

I am the Head of Engineering & General Engineering Manager for Apama Products, at Progress Software.

I joined Apama just a couple of weeks after the company was started, and have led the Engineering effort of its product line for most of the time since. Apama was acquired by Progress Software in 2005. Today, the Apama product line is the leader in Algorithmic Trading, Event Processing and BAM.

“The Apama architecture introduces an exciting, innovative way to look at the complex problems associated with analyzing and responding to data in real-time. As one of the market's first complex event processing (CEP) products, the architecture was formulated in the late 90's after ten years of research conducted at Cambridge University in the UK. The Progress Apama platform is the commercial realization of that research effort.

Apama inverts the classic paradigm of traditional systems. Instead of the store-index-query model of classic data architectures, Apama introduces a real-time computing engine that allows predefined event patterns (the logical equivalent of a database query of static data) to be preloaded into the system as event "Scenarios" that operated on events within streams. Rather than resource-intensive continuous queries on inbound events, event flow over the Apama Scenarios. When events or event patterns within the event streams match conditions specified in the Scenarios, they trigger responding actions also specified in the Scenarios.”

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Our goal is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership. Today the company has over 1,600 employees in over 90 countries. Progress is headquartered in Massachusetts, USA, and is a worldwide leader in application infrastructure software.

For more information on my professional background and expertise, please see my LinkedIn page.

Academic Background

I have a doctorate in Computer Science from the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University for my dissertation titled "An Architecture for Notification, Storage and Retrieval of Events". This was the outcome of research I carried out at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory under the supervision of Dr Jean Bacon and in collaboration with Dr John Bates.

My doctoral focus was on loosely coupled distributed systems middleware. This examined the use of storage and retrieval of distributed active (time-based) information for supporting and representing human and computer activity. Employing the event programming paradigm and a distributed event infrastructure we demonstrated how straight-forward it can be to construct large scale distributed applications out of re-usable components. We defined a model for events, and have demonstrated how generic storage and retrieval of events can be applied in a number of application domains, amongst which are collaboration environments and visualization of mobility.

During this period I authored a number of publications, which you are welcome to peruse here.

While researching for my PhD at Cambridge, I spent three months at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Palo Alto (CA, USA), investigating new architectures relating to monitoring distributed systems and scaling of weakly-consistent replicated databases.

Personal Information

I am originally from Malta, an island republic located at the centre of the Mediterranean. I am married and have two wonderful boys.

When I do get some spare time, which is rare these days between the hectic mix of work and family, I enjoy technological gadgetry, fast cars, stylish motorcycles, good old-fashioned sci-fi and fantasy books, and good cuisine. I also like to travel, although regrettably that that tends to be mostly for business reasons these days.

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