NEWRY technology giant First Derivatives has signed an agreement with South Korea’s Bistel that will see its Kx technology used in Bistel’s products.
Under the terms of the deal, many of BISTel’s products will have 'Kx Inside' within the next two years, with the first expected to launch in the first half of 2019.
Bistel supplies adaptive intelligence applications that combine human knowledge and advanced engineered to help factories detect, analyse, predict, and prescribe solutions to manufacturing.
Kx will store and analyse huge volumes of data generated from sensors within these applications.
This is the second major deal announced in just over a month by First Derivatives, where revenues in 2018 have grown to £186 million and which analysts are predicting will increase by a further 15 per cent to £215 million in 2019.
In September First Derivatives announced that the Kx technology had been selected by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) to build a new platform aiming to investigate and address suspicious market abuse cases.
The deal with BISTel, just over a month later, demonstrates Kx is picking up momentum in contract wins, which is supportive of our investment case around the stock, according to FD's chief executive Brian Conlon.
“This is another important contract for the company’s technology in the industrial internet of things market," he said, with the latest deals likely to spark discussions with other manufacturers over the Kx technology.
“Kx provides higher performance, greater scalability and lower total cost of ownership than competing solutions and we are engaged in multiple conversations across manufacturing, and other industries, with potential customers attracted by these benefits.”
Last month First Derivatives, which specialises in financial analysis software, said it intended to recruit 1,000 additional staff over the next three years, adding to its current payroll of 2,400 people across its Northern Ireland headquarters and global operations.
The company has been growing rapidly, with employee numbers increasing at an average annual rate of 31 per cent over the past three years.
