The 2015 Tech 50: John Bates

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John Bates
Chief Marketing Officer
Software AG
Last year: 35

Capital markets firms and their regulators are aggressively deploying big-data analytics tools to detect or mitigate rogue trades and flash crashes before they hurtle out of control. John Bates was working on such solutions long before the industry came calling. While at the University of Cambridge in the 1990s, the computer scientist co-founded Apama, whose complex-event-processing technology can ingest and act upon massive quantities of data in small fractions of a second. Initially applied in algorithmic trading, Apama’s CEP was found to be just as useful for compliance, risk management and market surveillance, A case in point is an abuse-detection system released last year for foreign exchange benchmarks. “Risk compliance is becoming the No. 1 topic on CEOs’ agendas. People have realized these systems all need to work together,” says Bates, 45, who has ridden along with Apama through two acquisitions: in 2005 to Progress Software Corp. of Bedford, Massachusetts, and in 2013 to Darmstadt, Germany–based Software AG, where he is now chief marketing officer and industry solutions leader. As he strategizes about enterprise software and big data, Bates is pondering the Internet of Things, which is the subject of his recent, Software AG–published book, Thingalytics. He is enthusiastic about the potential for “digitizing the real world and incorporating it into the digital world.” But, he warns, the “superfast algorithms” underlying the Internet of Things — like those in capital markets — “cannot run unsupervised.”

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The 2015 Tech 50