Chief Technology Officer
Progress Software Corp.
[PNR]
A University of Cambridge computer science Ph.D. and tenured professor, John Bates founded Apama in 1999 to commercialize his early work on complex event processing, which became an essential tool in algorithmic trading. In what he regards as a case example of “how eggheads can get out of the lab,” most of the 20 Ph.D.s who worked at Apama in the U.K. are still with Bates at Progress Software Corp., which acquired his company in 2005. Now that Bates is CTO of Bedford, Massachusetts–based Progress, his Apama handiwork has global distribution capabilities that he would have had difficulty amassing on his own. Growth has been especially healthy in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. In the wake of the flash crash and market reforms, the technology has been deployed by more than 15 exchanges, as well as by major brokerages and regulatory agencies, for real-time transaction monitoring and surveillance. CEP also plays a key role in what Bates, 41, calls “a powerful new paradigm” that Progress sells as Responsive Process Management, addressing “a broad set of use cases” for organizations to mine and manage data dynamically.
