< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud
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Simon Garland
Chief Strategist
DBS Bank
Last year: 40
As data continues to get bigger, the need for speed to process and analyze it never abates — and that plays into the hands of Kx Systems. It explains why the likes of Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley keep re-upping for the Palo Alto, California–based company’s kdb+ database technology. Chief strategist Simon Garland, 59, is responsible for technical support and ensuring that Kx brings the latest high-performance hardware capabilities to bear. A Securities Technology Analysis Center benchmark test in June 2013 left no doubt: Kdb+ ran eight times faster than previous results for volume-weighted average price calculations on tick data. Garland noted then that kdb+ was ready-made for the growing number of clients’ cores, or processing units, devoted to “numerous applications, including faster algorithmic trading, pretrade risk and real-time analytics.” Accommodating what Garland describes as “millions and millions of records and petabytes and petabytes of data,” and with a 64-bit computing architecture and its own “q” programming language, Kx pursues proprietary innovation to outpace competing products. At the same time, Kx is opening up. In April it made “q” and the 32-bit version of kdb+ available free to encourage entrepreneurship on the platform and launched a community website for “tips and input from people other than us,” says Garland, who joined Kx in 2002 after working in the database search business and Credit Suisse’s risk management department.
The 2014 Tech 50Click name to view ranking profile.
| 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Thomas Secunda Bloomberg | Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange | Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. | Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments | Lance Uggla Markit |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Robert Goldstein BlackRock | David Craig Thomson Reuters | Phupinder Gill CME Group | Anna Ewing NASDAQ OMX Group | R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures | Dan Mathisson Credit Suisse | Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings | Michael Spencer ICAP | Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| Joe Ratterman BATS Global Markets | Dominique Cerutti Euronext | Ron Levi GFI Group | Gaurav Suri D.E. Shaw Group | Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| Lou Eccleston S&P Capital IQ | Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets | Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings | Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings | Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. | Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. | Peter Carr Morgan Stanley | Hauke Stars Deutsche Börse | Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. |
| 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| David Gershon SuperDerivatives | Chris Corrado MSCI | Joseph Squeri Citadel | Tanuja Randery BT Global Services | John Bates Software AG |
| 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
| Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group | David Gledhill DBS Bank | Simon Garland Kx Systems | Cristóbal Conde FinTech Innovation Lab | Jeff Parker EidoSearch |
| 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 |
| Kim Fournais & Lars Seier Christensen Saxo Bank | Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates | Tyler Kim MaplesFS | Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. | Jim Minnick eVestment |
| 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 |
| Steven O’Hanlon Numerix | Sebastián Ceria Axioma | Yasuki Okai Nomura Research Institute | Niki Beattie Market Structure Partners | Mas Nakachi OpenGamma |
