Two startups in the infant field of complex event processing are trying to steal a march on their much larger competitors -- IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft -- by merging.

One of the companies, which produce systems for Wall Street traders, is Aleri. On Monday, it's announcing that it is acquiring another complex event processing startup, Coral8. Financial terms of the deal weren't discussed.

Aleri CEO Don DeLoach will become CEO and president of the merged entity but he said, despite how the deal is structured, it's more "a merger" of peers. Terry Cunningham, CEO of Coral8, he points out, will become chairman of the resulting company, also to be known as Aleri.

The new Aleri "will have an exceptionally strong customer base" and global technical support system by combining the resources of the two companies, DeLoach said.

"Our two products are targeted at different users. Aleri delivered a high-throughput, event-processing engine," that could be applied to online transaction processing situations. Coral8 concentrated on giving developers a way to analyze and display results of complex event processing at a portal Web site or other presentation method, he said.

Complex event processing is something like transaction processing. Indeed, transactions are a particular kind of complex event. But CEP spans a wider variety of defined processes, usually business processes, which someone wants to monitor and understand. By designating a period of time, for example, a trader on Wall Street can watch certain types of trading activity and process the events for trends and other information hidden in their details. Traders have been among the first to seize on the value of CEP, but it's assumed to one day have broader value in the enterprise.

InformationWeek has published an independent analysis of the complex event-processing marketplace. Download the report here (registration required).