Dalton's role is to help Kx customers - the largest financial institutions in the world - implement the strategic and proprietary solutions that give these leaders their competitive edge. The position of Chief Solutions Architect was created for Dalton, an expert in developing vastly scalable parallel and distributed solutions. As part of the Kx technology team, he will advise Kx prospects and customers before and after the sale on the IT architecture best suited to their performance requirements.

Currently based in London, Dalton reports to Janet Lustgarten, President. His addition to Kx underscores the company's commitment to serving the top-tier financial firms that have formed its customer base since 1993. Recent use of Kx software has expanded to increasingly sophisticated streaming solutions, such as cross-asset auto trading and full depth-of-book analysis. In addition, growing numbers of Kx customers now rely on the kdb+ historical database to implement large-scale data warehouse and analytics applications for compliance, data-mining, asset management, and market research.

"Over the past decade, I have consistently worked on language implementation and programming for parallel and distributed systems to solve real-world problems," Dalton said. "As a result, my large-scale view crosses all the abstraction layers, from processor micro-architecture up to parallel programming on large clusters and service oriented architectures in distributed systems. It's this combination of knowledge that I am excited to leverage on behalf of Kx customers, as they continue to solve the challenges of working with enormous volumes of data."

Prior to joining Kx, Dalton co-founded xrnd (extreme research and development), an advanced technology consultancy helping clients in a variety of industries process ever-greater volumes of data in high-performance, scalable, and often real-time environments. In addition, Dalton was with lastminute.com, designing and implementing scalable software architectures for the travel site's high-volume e-commerce search engines. His experience also includes backend technology for Java compilers at the Silicomp Research Institute in Grenoble, France.

"Kx is fortunate to have an architect with Niall Dalton's expertise and track record in large-scale, high-performance solutions," said Lustgarten. "Kx customers are now capturing and responding to 1 billion streaming records per day from the exchanges. Having Niall on board lets Kx customers know they can continue to rely on us for the performance and implementation expertise required to support the next generation of high-volume 64-bit applications."