The 2014 Trading Technology 40: Donal Byrne

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Donal Byrne

CEO

Corvil

(Previously not ranked)

After Corvil was formed in 2000, financial firms became eager buyers of its network-monitoring technology for latency management: It helped to measure and support the performance guarantees in algorithmic trading. “We had the ability to monitor traffic and data on very short time-scales, in milliseconds and microseconds,” recalls Donal Byrne, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from University College Dublin and was Corvil’s chairman for two years before becoming CEO in 2002. Latency management attracted major exchanges and brokerages around the world into Corvil’s orbit, and the company proceeded to broaden its role in what it began labeling last year as “operational performance monitoring” across financial market infrastructures, as well as other IT components, such as databases. Its CorvilNet release in October was a real-time, multi-asset-class monitoring system for all aspects of e-trading and its web of interconnections. Deployed at more than 25 institutions so far, CorvilNet could be a “de facto standard platform for performance, risk and compliance monitoring,” says Byrne, 48, a broadband-network veteran who divides his time among the 90-employee company’s principal offices in London and New York, Dublin and client sites in global financial centers. Industry players are looking closely at using Corvil’s high-speed analytics in their “kill switches” for when glitches or anomalies threaten wide-scale breakdowns. Hazards lurk in “what you don’t know and haven’t thought of,” says Byrne. “The network is where the information is, and Corvil is tapped into the network data flows.”