The 2015 Tech 50: Brian Conlon

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

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Brian Conlon
Chief Executive Officer
First Derivatives
PNR

When Brian Conlon left a consulting job with SunGard Data Systems to found First Derivatives in 1996, he didn’t change his line of work. The Newry, Northern Ireland–based company grew up as a financial technology consulting firm. But after accumulating expertise working with market data and trading platforms, First Derivatives in 2008 began to roll out its Delta suite of software applications, which today includes platforms for trading, trade surveillance, data management and analytics. “The company’s heritage is in the capital markets industry, where we’ve been working on a lot of the trouble banks have been facing in dealing with large amounts of real-time and historical data,” notes CEO Conlon, 48. “Banks are faced with millions upon millions of prices and codes coming in every second, changing the value of their portfolio, changing the pricing of their products and changing their risk position.” In what Conlon termed “the most significant development” of the fiscal year ended February 2015, the company last fall bought a controlling interest in Palo Alto, California–based Kx Systems, whose kdb+ time-series databases power trading, risk and other data-intensive functions at top Wall Street firms (and whose chief strategy officer, Simon Garland, was No. 38 last year). Conlon says the Kx technology, thanks to years of collaborative effort among developers and users, has been “sharpened and honed” to the point of being “almost faultless.” First Derivatives reported a 19 percent year-over-year increase in revenue, to £83.2 million ($129 million), and Conlon says he is eyeing big-data-type opportunities in such nonfinancial sectors as utilities, oil and gas, health care, pharmaceuticals and the Internet of Things.

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”

The 2015 Tech 50