The 2014 Tech 50: Simon Garland

July 08, 2014

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

Simon Garland

Chief Strategist

DBS Bank

Last year: 40

As data continues to get bigger, the need for speed to process and analyze it never abates — and that plays into the hands of Kx Systems. It explains why the likes of Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley keep re-upping for the Palo Alto, California–based company’s kdb+ database technology. Chief strategist Simon Garland, 59, is responsible for technical support and ensuring that Kx brings the latest high-performance hardware capabilities to bear. A Securities Technology Analysis Center benchmark test in June 2013 left no doubt: Kdb+ ran eight times faster than previous results for volume-weighted average price calculations on tick data. Garland noted then that kdb+ was ready-made for the growing number of clients’ cores, or processing units, devoted to “numerous applications, including faster algorithmic trading, pretrade risk and real-time analytics.” Accommodating what Garland describes as “millions and millions of records and petabytes and petabytes of data,” and with a 64-bit computing architecture and its own “q” programming language, Kx pursues proprietary innovation to outpace competing products. At the same time, Kx is opening up. In April it made “q” and the 32-bit version of kdb+ available free to encourage entrepreneurship on the platform and launched a community website for “tips and input from people other than us,” says Garland, who joined Kx in 2002 after working in the database search business and Credit Suisse’s risk management department.

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