This content is from: Portfolio
The 2015 Tech 50: John Bates
The chief marketing officer of Sofware AG climbs to No. 32 on this year’s Tech 50 ranking.

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.”
See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”
![]() 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. ![]() 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group ![]() 4. Lance Uggla Markit ![]() 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock |
![]() 6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg ![]() 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group ![]() 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures ![]() 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments ![]() 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group |
![]() 11. David Craig Thomson Reuters ![]() 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings ![]() 13. Michael Spencer ICAP ![]() 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. ![]() 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing |
![]() 16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets ![]() 17. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. ![]() 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group ![]() 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. ![]() 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. |
![]() 21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets ![]() 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings ![]() 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings ![]() 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. ![]() 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp. |
![]() 26. John Marcante Vanguard Group ![]() 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel ![]() 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group ![]() 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse ![]() 30. Chris Corrado MSCI |
![]() 31. David Gledhill DBS Bank ![]() 32. John Bates Software AG ![]() 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz ![]() 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group ![]() 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group |
![]() 36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse ![]() 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives ![]() 38. Jim Minnick eVestment ![]() 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais ![]() 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS |
![]() 41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. ![]() 42. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix ![]() 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma ![]() 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America ![]() 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite |
![]() 46. Mazy Dar OpenFin ![]() 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software ![]() 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma ![]() 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group ![]() 50. Jock Percy Perseus |