Sustaining Members’ News

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Kx Systems¶

Charles Skelton to take over as CTO¶

Financial industry veteran Charles Skelton will take up the position of Chief Technology Officer on 1 November, replacing Niall Dalton.

Prior to joining Kx, Charles Skelton was the owner of and principal consultant at Skelton Consulting GmbH, a product development and software consulting company specialising in financial-markets technology. Skelton has been working closely with Kx for a number of years; his company’s focus was on advanced market data capture and analytics using Kx’s kdb+. Skelton has expertise in writing feed handlers, as well as in-depth experience in setting up very large, high-performance, infrastructure market-data systems for tier-one banks. Skelton’s responsibilities will include working with Kx’s development team on product development, enhancement and support, focusing on new features; he has a proactive style and intends to be in regular and close contact with Kx’s client base.

Dalton will relinquish his current position of CTO at the end of October, but will remain with Kx in a consultancy capacity. This new role will allow Dalton greater flexibility to pursue some of his other technology and personal interests.

Says Janet Lustgarten, CEO of Kx: “I am delighted that Charles is joining us. We have been working with him for many years so he has an intimate knowledge of kdb+ and q, and already knows many of our clients. Having been a client of Kx, Charles has been on the ‘other side of the fence’ and has a great deal of insight into what our clients need from us. It is great to have Charles as part of our team, and I’m very much looking forward to working with him even more closely than before. I would also like to thank Niall for all of his fantastic work at Kx. Niall has always made it clear that he had other interests outside of Kx that he wished to pursue at some stage and I am pleased for him that he is now taking the time to do so. Importantly, his leadership in creating a community environment within Kx has and will continue to be of tremendous benefit to our clients.”

Skelton spent ten years in the telecoms industry as a consultant developing real-time software for large multinationals before moving into technology for financial institutions. During his many years in this market Skelton has assisted numerous institutions such as JP Morgan, HypoVereinsbank and Deutsche Bank with their deployment of kdb+. He has provided consultancy to firms based in the US, Germany, the UK and Spain.

“I was fortunate to have worked with Kx on kdb+ applications for a number of years and have been an active member of the Kx community, often presenting at the annual Kx conferences. I am very excited with this opportunity to be more involved with Kx and to use my expertise for the benefit of all Kx clients,” Skelton says.

Kx growth continues with new partner in Australia¶

Kx Systems has signed a partnership agreement with Hologram Business Intelligence, the Australian-based supplier of business performance management solutions.

The relationship between the two companies goes back a long way and means that they already have an in-depth understanding of each other’s products and businesses. The deal will see Hologram taking on the sales, support and consultancy of Kx’s Kdb+ database and its q language in the Asia-Pacific region. Kx products may also be incorporated into Hologram’s offerings in the future.

Hologram’s extensive experience in array-language development and applications in the finance, banking and treasury industries makes it a natural and easy fit with Kx. Hologram’s business focus includes high-performance, real-time transaction-monitoring and data-information systems. The company’s principals have an established track record of working with banks, exchanges and credit unions in development and consultancy in areas such as treasury systems, anti money laundering, risk management, compliance reporting, portfolio management and trading systems. They have worked with institutions around the world including the Bank of South Australia and Société Générale, as well as the stock exchanges of Singapore, Indonesia, Istanbul and Oslo.

Janet Lustgarten, CEO of Kx Systems, comments, “We are very much looking forward to working with Hologram and extending our product reach to include Australia and New Zealand. Their thorough understanding of our language and database means that they will be able to help financial institutions in their region make full use of the benefits provided by Kx products. I’m excited about the opportunities offered by the partnership and of extending the Kx product family to the region.”

Says Guy Pitman, founder and director of Hologram, “We see great potential for Kdb+ and q, particularly in the areas of real-time data analysis and high-end database engines for data-intensive applications in finance, fraud, banking and other high-volume transaction systems. With two offices in Australia and eyes firmly set on New Zealand and Asia we are exceptionally well positioned to build momentum and growth around Kx’s products.” Pitman adds, “I believe that high-end transaction processing is currently less sophisticated than it could be in Australia and New Zealand. Working with Kx will allow us to offer an exceptional service to institutions operating in this field.”

Enhanced multi-core Kdb+ includes DTrace and more speed¶

Kx Systems has announced a new version of Kdb+. With the progress in hardware development and rising data volumes it is essential that software is able to not merely keep up with progress, but make the absolute best use of hardware improvements. This is why every new version of Kdb+ is described as being even faster than the previous version – because it is.

From the outset Kdb+ was specifically designed and optimised for multi-core capability, and can handle all machines available on the market. The soon-to-be-released v.2.5 benefits from even faster multi-threading as well as a number of other significant enhancements including DTrace support, optimised intelligent memory allocation, and a number of new interfaces. Now available to customers for final testing and evaluation, v.2.5 will be noticeably faster for queries, especially on large databases.

Support for DTrace, a powerful infrastructure for analysing the allocation and usage of resources on large servers running Solaris, is now available in Kdb+. Some of Kx’s largest clients, including many tier-one banks, now see support for DTrace as non-negotiable in their core infrastructure products and critical services such as Kdb+.

Kx recognises that institutions are facing growing pressures on their resources. A number of enhancements in v.2.5 have been made to help financial institutions address some of those issues. DTrace allows very detailed (low-level) monitoring which does not modify code and helps to track down bottlenecks. More efficient threading means that large partitioned databases will be considerably faster. In addition existing interfaces to Java, C#, C, C++ and Excel have been enhanced, while interfaces to R and F# have been added.

“Intel is focused on the massive compute workloads across the trading lifecycle – from market data, through analytics and risk to trade routing,” said Nigel Woodward, Intel Global Financial Services Director. “Throughput and low-latency at every stage are critical, which is why Intel works closely with Kx so that Kx’s software structure and Intel’s parallel processor infrastructure combine to provide a competitive advantage to our mutual clients.”

Says Simon Garland, chief strategist at Kx, “Our customers expect Kx to be the fastest. To achieve this we constantly work on optimisation and ensure that Kdb+ is able to make use of the latest developments in technology. We are also very conscious of the need to be good citizens when using resources: where several years ago a vendor might have expected to have exclusive use of a machine that is no longer the case. The new version of Kdb+ has been further optimised to allow our clients to get the most out of their new hardware.”