news from Kx Systems, Inc.

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 12

Kx Systems¶

Kx Appoints Janet Lustgarten President¶

Janet Lustgarten, Chairman and former CEO, has been appointed to the role of President. Ms. Lustgarten, who will remain in the Palo Alto company headquarters, will lead the strategic direction of Kx, focusing on sales and customer relations.

The role of President was created to manage Kx through its next growth phase as the company’s kdb+ database becomes increasingly deployed across the enterprise. Ms. Lustgarten, a co-founder of the company, said, “Use of the kdb+ platform is increasing in applications for financial services as well as other industries. We’re in a high-growth time, and I am excited to be a part of this next phase.”

Cantor Fitzgerald Makes Faster Market Decisions with Realtime Analysis Platform Built on Kx Systems¶

Kx Systems announced that Cantor Fitzgerald has completed a comprehensive system to handle historical data analysis and immediate querying of streaming market data based entirely on the Kx kdb+ database and “q” programming language. Cantor’s traders use the solution to integrate their risk management and trading strategies and optimize short-term opportunities.

With this system, traders now track their portfolio risk and trades in realtime, in relation to other trades being made in the market, thus immediately gauging the momentum of price moves. This capability enables Cantor to make trading decisions instantly and get in and out of a market quickly - without compromising risk management.

“Everyone talks about realtime risk management, but with kdb+ we actually attain it,” said Jacob Loveless, SVP at Cantor. “We’ve gone beyond simply knowing the risk to being able to act on it in the moment.”

Cantor began working with Kx software in November 2005 and wrote a back-testing program in two days. Other capabilities were then added to build on the uniform kdb+ architecture for historical and real-time data. “The ability to integrate realtime publishing with historical searches made kdb+ the obvious choice for our new analysis system,” said Loveless.

Because the entire system is written in the q language integrated with kdb+, there is zero latency between data capture and analysis. The unified platform architecture used by Kx eliminates the latency found where traditional applications connect to multiple external databases, and their various query languages, as well as to feed handlers and servers written in a variety of languages.

“Kx provides a unified platform that is unmatched for flexibility,” added Loveless. “In this industry, our priorities for a programming language are simple - productivity and speed. Q delivers both, and it includes a realtime database that can keep up.” Kdb+ eliminates the typical development scenario in which programmers must update several often incompatible databases and programs in order to develop, test, and release new code. For Cantor making changes to different parts of the system is fast and simple.

Cantor has also taken advantage of kdb+ support from Kx Systems’ sales and services partner First Derivatives (FD), plc. “Support response using FD’s email support system is fast,” said Loveless. “Typically, I email a question, go get a cup of coffee, and have the response I need waiting for me when I get back to my desk.”

“Cantor is the ideal example of how the world’s most innovative investment firms are using Kx Systems products today,” commented Simon Garland, Kx CTO. “It’s no longer about building separate systems for tick data, historical queries, cross-asset data trading, and so on. It’s about solving the entire puzzle at once, which is exactly what kdb+ was designed to do.”

Developer Community Website¶

Kdb+ users now have access to a community code and information repository at http://code.kx.com. Code.kx contains an online reference manual, user-contributed code, a tutorial, cookbooks and more. Contributions and corrections/updates from the kdb+ community are welcome and encouraged. If you are a kdb+ developer and have not yet received your login, contact codeadmin@kx.com.

International Users Conference¶

Kx will be holding its Kx2007 International Users Conference from May 23-25, 2007, at historic Dromoland Castle in the west of Ireland. This is our premier 2007 training and networking conference for the Kx user community.

Attendance is by invitation only. To request an invitation, contact kx2007@kx.com. Visit www.kx.com/kx2007 for complete information on the conference—we hope that all users of Kx products will join us.