The 2017 Tech 40: Brian Conlon

Wall Street has been ahead of much of the corporate world in seeing the enormity of big data and finding technology to analyze it. Major capital markets players like Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley have for years been users of First Derivatives' Kx Systems — high-performance databases for crunching huge sets of historical and streaming market data. First Derivatives was a longtime strategic partner of Kx before picking up a controlling interest in the Palo Alto, California-based business in 2014. Now the Newry, Northern Ireland-based company, founded in 1996 by chief executive officer Brian Conlon, is taking the technology beyond finance. Recent sales announcements cite analytical applications of Kx in satellite imagery with a unit of Airbus, and in health care with startup RxDataScience. "We have the engine to power people's ideas," says Conlon. The CEO has his sights on an "addressable target market" exceeding $60 billion in such data-rich and analytics-hungry areas as cybersecurity, the Internet of Things, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. In May, First Derivatives reported preliminary earnings that Conlon, 51, calls "another monumental year," with revenue in the 12 months through February rising 30 percent to £152 million ($197.5 million). Of that, £117 million was in fintech.