Mark Sykes Appointed as Group CTO to Build on Industry Leading Performance of KX

First Derivatives (FD) announces that Mark Sykes has been appointed to the role of Group Chief Technology Officer (CTO) with immediate effect.

The Group will benefit from Mark’s more than 20 years of experience implementing enterprise technology strategy. Since joining First Derivatives plc in 2016 as COO of KX Systems, as a member of the Group’s Executive Management team, he has driven major technology initiatives, including the release of new features such as anymap for unstructured data, the ability for KX to work on the major public clouds and integration with other technologies and platforms such as Python and Machine Learning. All of these improvements have been delivered while adhering to the philosophy of increased performance and industry-leading stability.

Mark will be responsible for developing and delivering the product strategy for the Group’s range of solutions across all verticals. His priorities include embedding machine learning within all solutions and enabling KX to work seamlessly across hybrid cloud environments.

Mark Sykes, Group Chief Technical Officer of FD, commented: “I am delighted to take on this important role at an exciting time in the Group’s development. KX continues to set performance benchmarks for the analysis of vast quantities of real-time and historic data and a key part of my task is to increase its capabilities and ease of use, to help our current and future customers handle their most demanding data challenges.”

Brian Conlon, Chief Executive Officer of FD, commented: “Mark has driven huge improvements in the performance and ease of deployment of KX in the past three years which have helped cement its place as the world’s leading time-series database. I am delighted he has taken on this critical role as we aim to make our technology ubiquitous across multiple industries.”

About FD                                                                                                      

First Derivatives is a global technology provider with 20 years of experience working with some of the world’s largest finance, technology, retail, pharma, manufacturing and energy institutions. The Group’s KX technology, incorporating the kdb+ time-series database, is a leader in high-performance, in-memory computing, streaming analytics and operational intelligence. KX delivers the best possible performance and flexibility for high-volume, data-intensive analytics and applications across multiple industries. The Group operates from 14 offices across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, including its headquarters in Newry, and employs more than 2,400 people worldwide.