< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow

As chief technology officer of International Securities Exchange since March 2013, Robert Cornish has focused on building a “dev-ops” organization, breaking down traditional development and operations silos to foster communication and collaboration more quickly and in tune with business strategies. The new reality is that “we all code,” says Cornish, 44, whom New York–based ISE hired as a software consultant in 1999 and brought on full-time after launching the first U.S. all-electronic options market the following year. “That’s the bar we set for ourselves,” he continues, adding that ISE is “bringing on the next generation of technologists.” The ISE teams are using open-source tools like GitHub to streamline project management and Puppet Enterprise for automating IT tasks. To build a server and allocate storage to it, for example, took two different teams, infrastructure and operations, which subsequently handed the software off to the development group for testing and deployment. Cornish points out that “the market starts up, runs and shuts down without human intervention” and that ISE has been responsive to members’ admonitions that “you protect us — don’t put additional risk on our plate.” But things did not go smoothly on December 15, when the ISE and ISE Gemini exchanges, which account for about 12 percent of options trading, went down shortly after opening. ISE attributed the outage to “connectivity issues” and stayed closed “to prepare for a normal resumption of trading the following day.”

 
The 2015 Trading Technology 40

1	2	3	4	5
Kevin Kometer CME Group	Richard Prager BlackRock	Raymond Tierney III Bloomberg Tradebook	Jonathan Ross KCG Holdings	Charles Vice Intercontinental Exchange
6	7 Zef Nikolla	8	9	10
Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets	Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group	Brad Levy MarkitSERV	Dan Keegan Citi	Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional
11 Mark McQueen	12	13	14	15 Margaret Fox
Gerard Beatty Goldman Sachs Group	Gerald O'Connell CBOE Holdings	Brenda Hoffman TMX Group	Billy Hult Tradeweb Markets	Nicholas Themelis MarketAxess Holdings
16	17	18 Martin H. Simon	19 Todd Plitt	20 A.E. Fletcher Photography
Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch	Gil Mandelzis EBS-BrokerTec (ICAP)	Steven Randich Financial Industry Regulatory Authority	Jerry Dobner GFI Group	Michael Liberman BlueMountain Capital Management
21	22 Photographer:http://www.digitalh	23	24 Dennis Degnan	25 Paul Elledge
Bill Chow and Richard Leung Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing	Jamie Selway Investment Technology Group	Brad Katsuyama IEX Group	John Mackay (Mack) Gill MillenniumIT	Jamil Nazarali Citadel Execution Services
26	27	28 Picasa	29 Andrew Harrer	30 Takashi KATO
Robert Cornish International Securities Exchange	Tyler Moeller andJoshua Walksy Broadway Technology	Rishi Nangalia REDI Holdings	Manoj Narang Tradeworx, Thesys Technologies	Oki Matsumoto Monex Group
31	32 unknown	33 Douglas Kurn	34 Luludi/LUZ	35 William Neumann Photography
Alasdair Haynes Aquis Exchange	Veronica Augustsson Cinnober Financial Technology	Stu Taylor Algomi	Luís Otávio Saliba Furtado BM&FBovespa	Tal Cohen Chi-X Global Holdings
36	37	38	39	40
Donal Byrne Corvil	R. Cromwell Coulson OTC Markets Group	Alfred Eskandar Portware	Richard Korhammer SR Labs	Hazem Dawani OptionsCity Software