The Management Team
Jim Downs
Jim serves as Chief Executive Officer and is responsible for the strategic direction of Connamara Systems.
Previous to founding Connamara systems, Jim Downs was member of the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago
Board Options Exchange. During this period, Jim spent most of his time as a market maker in the OEX and
SPX options at the CBOE and as a local trader in agricultural futures at the CBT. Jim also served on
market making and technology committees of both exchanges. He founded and managed one of the first CBOE
market making groups to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the CBOE with the launch of the
Retail Automatic Execution System (RAES). This was the precursor of electronic options trading as the
system automatically matched incoming customer orders to market maker quotes.
Prior to entering the derivatives trading industry, Jim worked for Honeywell Avionics in Minneapolis,
Minnesota as a Quality Assurance Engineer and The Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, Virginia as as
technical project manager and communications engineer.
Jim has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.
Mike Gatny
Mike serves as systems architect and a project delivery manager. Mike also leads teams
at Connamara creating low latency market data solutions.
Prior to joining Connamara, Mike was a consultant at The Linux Box, Ann Arbor, MI. While
at The Linux Box, Mike wrote system software, deployed and tuned servers, and delivered
professional training courses, all on the GNU/Linux platform.
Mike graduated from the University of Michigan, College of Engineering with a Bachelor
of Science in Computer Science.
Chris Busbey
Chris serves as systems architect and a project delivery manager. Chris also leads application
infrastructure design teams to create frameworks for low-latency trading.
Prior to joining Connamara, Chris was a Software Engineer at Cerner Corporation, Kansas City,
MO. While at Cerner, Chris developed software for diagnostic radiology visualization solutions.
Chris holds a Bachelor of Science and a Masters of Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
John Vatianou
John manages the Business analysts group and is responsible for project management,
requirements and integration test design and implementation.
Prior to joining Connamara, John was a project manager at GL Consultants, Inc. in Chicago.
At GL John was responsible for requirements gathering and coordination between developers and customers.
John holds a Bachelor of Arts from Aurora University, Aurora, Illinois and a Masters of Science,
Information Systems from DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.
Harvinder Vasdev
Harvinder is responsible for user interface design and implementation. He has been working for Connamara for over 10 years. Prior to joining Connamara, Harvinder was a software Engineer at SSI, Delhi, India. While at SSI, Harvinder delivered professional training courses on application architecture involving distributed applications.
Harvinder holds a Bachelor of Science from University of Delhi, India.