First Derivatives has evolved its Delta software platform, powered by kdb+, into marketing analytics through the launch of Delta Marketing Cloud. 

This demonstrates Delta’s ability to find applications beyond the Capital Markets sector and is the first new vertical market for the Group since it secured a majority stake in Kx Systems. The move is supported by the signing of a number of key pilot customers.
 
The explosion of digital and mobile marketing across all vertical markets is driving the need for technologies that can provide real-time analysis of large data volumes, which the Delta platform is ideally placed to meet.  Industry analysts CEB estimate that marketing software spend will reach USD32 billion by 2018 while, according to the Economist, the digital marketing sector is “going through something akin to the automation of the financial markets in the 1980s, with low latency the key to success.” Delta Marketing Cloud assists by combining both speed and scale with a flexible scoring algorithm and alerting process to allow clients to target the right prospects at the right time.
 
The launch of Delta Marketing Cloud leverages the power of the Group’s big data expertise to help sales and marketing professionals increase the return on their marketing and digital advertising investment, using the same core architecture currently used for analysis of billions of financial transactions per day. It combines real-time and reference data from numerous sources including website traffic, real-time advertising data, social media with proprietary CRM and other customer data.  This produces a range of data analytics, such as predictive account-based scoring with real time geographic alert functionality to drive the responsiveness of sales channels.
 
Brian Conlon, CEO of First Derivatives, says: “We are pleased with the level of interest being shown in Delta Marketing Cloud which has already resulted in us signing a number of key pilot customers. While its commercialisation is still at an early stage, we believe it has the potential to generate significant recurring revenues for the Group. The launch also demonstrates the flexibility of the Delta platform and its ability to take us into new markets where there are exceptionally large volumes of data that require real time analysis. Our technology and experience gives First Derivatives a strong position in this expanding market.”