The 2014 Tech 50: John Bates

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

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John Bates

Chief Technology Officer, Intelligent Business Operations and Big Data

Software AG

Last year: 35

At the CeBIT technology extravaganza in Hannover, Germany, in March, both U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel stopped by the exhibit of Software AG. “That’s how big we are,” says John Bates of the €973 million ($1.3 billion)-in-revenue company. Outside Europe and particularly in capital markets, Darmstadt-based Software AG doesn’t have the brand recognition of the much larger German enterprise-software provider SAP. Bates, 44, and the intelligent-business-operations platform he oversees are changing that. While teaching at the University of Cambridge in the 1990s, Bates was an inventor of complex-event processing, now ubiquitous in algorithmic trading and other high-performance computing operations. Apama, the CEP company he founded, was acquired in 2005 by Bedford, Massachusetts–based Progress Software Corp., where Bates was chief technology officer until the July 2013 sale of Apama to Software AG. Still a CTO, based in the Boston area but spending much of his time on the road, the British-born computer scientist is a key player in Software AG’s push to deliver “smart big data”solutions. Along with the mark Apama and its analytics have made in e-trading, compliance and regulatory surveillance, other Software AG properties, such as Terracotta (in-memory databases and low-latency messaging, acquired in 2011) and JackBe (real-time visualization, 2013), constitute “a new paradigm for high-velocity capital markets applications,” says Bates.

The 2014 Tech 50

1 Dave Cross	1	3 IAN CURCIO 2011	4 FayFoto/Boston	5 Teri Pengilley
Thomas Secunda Bloomberg	Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange	Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.	Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments	Lance Uggla Markit
6	7	8 Photographer:Charlie Simokaitis	9	10 Mark McQueen
Robert Goldstein BlackRock	David Craig Thomson Reuters	Phupinder Gill CME Group	Anna Ewing NASDAQ OMX Group	R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group
11	12	13	14	15 Christopher Elston
Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures	Dan Mathisson Credit Suisse	Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings	Michael Spencer ICAP	Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
16	17	18 Todd Plitt	19	20
Joe Ratterman BATS Global Markets	Dominique Cerutti Euronext	Ron Levi GFI Group	Gaurav Suri D.E. Shaw Group	Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing
21 Larry Lettera/ Camera 1	22	23	24 XT	25
Lou Eccleston S&P Capital IQ	Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets	Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings	Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings	Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group
26 Production	27 Wayne R. Martin	28	29 Thorsten Jansen	30 Adam B. Auel
Christopher Perretta State Street Corp.	Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co.	Peter Carr Morgan Stanley	Hauke Stars Deutsche Börse	Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp.
31	32	33 Paul Elledge	34	35 Stephen Brashear
David Gershon SuperDerivatives	Chris Corrado MSCI	Joseph Squeri Citadel	Tanuja Randery BT Global Services	John Bates Software AG
36	37	38	39 Photo Credit: Kevin Irby	40
Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group	David Gledhill DBS Bank	Simon Garland Kx Systems	Cristóbal Conde FinTech Innovation Lab	Jeff Parker EidoSearch
41	42 Jeff Smith Photo	43	44	45
Kim Fournais & Lars Seier Christensen Saxo Bank	Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates	Tyler Kim MaplesFS	Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp.	Jim Minnick eVestment
46	47	48 tomohisa ichiki	49 David Poultney	50 A.E. Fletcher Photography
Steven O’Hanlon Numerix	Sebastián Ceria Axioma	Yasuki Okai Nomura Research Institute	Niki Beattie Market Structure Partners	Mas Nakachi OpenGamma