< The 2017 Tech 40

36. Brian Conlon
Chief Executive Officer
First Derivatives and
Kx Systems
Last year: 41

Wall Street has been ahead of much of the corporate world in seeing the enormity of big data and finding technology to analyze it. Major capital markets players like Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley have for years been users of First Derivatives' Kx Systems — high-performance databases for crunching huge sets of historical and streaming market data. First Derivatives was a longtime strategic partner of Kx before picking up a controlling interest in the Palo Alto, California-based business in 2014. Now the Newry, Northern Ireland-based company, founded in 1996 by chief executive officer Brian Conlon, is taking the technology beyond finance. Recent sales announcements cite analytical applications of Kx in satellite imagery with a unit of Airbus, and in health care with startup RxDataScience. "We have the engine to power people's ideas," says Conlon. The CEO has his sights on an "addressable target market" exceeding $60 billion in such data-rich and analytics-hungry areas as cybersecurity, the Internet of Things, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. In May, First Derivatives reported preliminary earnings that Conlon, 51, calls "another monumental year," with revenue in the 12 months through February rising 30 percent to £152 million ($197.5 million). Of that, £117 million was in fintech.

 
The 2017 Tech 40

1. Adena Friedman NASDAQ 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange Sponsored Is the Market Really Sure About Its Direction? Sponsored by CME Group October 27, 2025 5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. David Craig Thomson Reuters 8. Michael Spencer NEX Group 9. Don Callahan Citigroup 10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group

11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 12. Terrence Duffy CME Group 13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments 15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings

16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp. 17. Steven Lieblich Citadel 18. David Rutter R3CEV 19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments

21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group 22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 24. David Gledhill DBS Bank 25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings

26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 27. Peter Brown & Robert Mercer Renaissance Technologies 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp. 30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence

31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma

36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems 37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions 40. Jim Minnick eVestment