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.
1  | 1  | 3  | 4  | 5  |
| Thomas Secunda Bloomberg | Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange | Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. | Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments | Lance Uggla Markit |
6  | 7  | 8  | 9  | 10  |
| 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  |
| Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures | Dan Mathisson Credit Suisse | Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings | Michael Spencer ICAP | Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. |
16  | 17  | 18  | 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  | 22  | 23  | 24  | 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  | 27  | 28  | 29  | 30  |
| 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  | 34  | 35  |
| David Gershon SuperDerivatives | Chris Corrado MSCI | Joseph Squeri Citadel | Tanuja Randery BT Global Services | John Bates Software AG |
36  | 37  | 38  | 39  | 40  |
| Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group | David Gledhill DBS Bank | Simon Garland Kx Systems | Cristóbal Conde FinTech Innovation Lab | Jeff Parker EidoSearch |
41  | 42  | 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  | 49  | 50  |
| Steven O’Hanlon Numerix | Sebastián Ceria Axioma | Yasuki Okai Nomura Research Institute | Niki Beattie Market Structure Partners | Mas Nakachi OpenGamma |