MarkLogic Names Apama Co-founder Nelson Finance CTO

San Carlos, Calif.-based NoSQL database and integration technology provider MarkLogic has appointed former Software AG and Progress Software technology executive Giles Nelson CTO for its financial services business, based in London.

His new role combines technology evangelism and product strategy, representing the vendor among financial firms, and representing the needs of financial services and capital markets firms within the company.

“Financial services is a big vertical for us—six of the top eight US banks are clients—so my role is to ensure we have the right go-to-market strategy in this space, and that we’re paying attention to things like new regulations, and that we understand how MarkLogic can address those issues,” Nelson says. “Firms may have built up siloed databases over 30 years or so, so what you really need to do is bring them together. But with so much unstructured information across all sorts of documents, you have to treat data differently—and that’s what MarkLogic does. It enables organizations to leverage that data and get more value from it, quicker.”

Nelson was previously SVP of product strategy and marketing at Software AG, responsible for its financial analytics products including the Apama complex event processing technology and Terracotta. He joined Software AG via its 2013 acquisition of Apama from Progress Software, where he served as VP of products and CTO for EMEA, following the vendor’s 2005 purchase of Apama, which he co-founded in 2000.

In addition, Nelson says MarkLogic can help firms seeking to make money from proprietary datasets that may constitute “alternative data” that can be commercialized or used to gain a competitive advantage. “There is so much data within these organizations, but it needs transforming. Institutions have built up their ‘data estates’—and leveraging those is one way to get a real advantage in the market. And enabling them to do that in a more agile, cost-effective way… is what MarkLogic is all about,” he says.