The 2013 Tech 50: John Bates

British-born computer scientist John Bates claims the distinction of introducing hyperfast complex-event-processing systems to the financial industry, helping to fuel the algorithmic trading boom. Today he is hardly alone in regarding high frequency trading as a contributor to the complexity of market systems and fears of flash crashes — and he puts the adaptive, “self-learning” analytical capabilities of CEP forward as a solution. The 43-year-old executive vice president and CTO of Progress Software Corp. has been working to incorporate “solution accelerators” into the Progress Apama platform that identify emerging patterns in trading and market behavior in real time and flag deviations from the norm before they become problematic. “Traditional surveillance solutions have been all about looking for deviance based on past patterns,” explains Bates, who joined Bedford, Massachusetts–based Progress in 2005 when it acquired Apama, the company he founded in 1999 while teaching at the University of Cambridge. “We’re still looking for patterns, but we’re making it real-time and more complex than before,” he adds. Bates will be moving along with Apama to Germany’s Software AG when it completes its purchase of the business in a deal announced in June. As at rival StreamBase Systems (see Mark Palmer, No. 36), CEP sales to exchanges and regulators have been rising alongside those to financial firms.