< The 2015 Trading Technology 40: Going with the Flow
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Robert Cornish
Chief Technology Officer
International Securities Exchange
Last year: 21
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 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Chris Isaacson BATS Global Markets | Bradley Peterson Nasdaq OMX Group | Brad Levy MarkitSERV | Dan Keegan Citi | Ronald DePoalo Fidelity Institutional |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 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 | 19 | 20 |
| 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 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 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 | 29 | 30 |
| 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 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| 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 |
