Bates is an entrepreneur in the software industry, focusing on areas such as event-driven architectures, smart environments, business activity monitoring and Internet of Things.
[8][9][10][11] Bates has published 2015 a book entitled Thingalytics: Smart Big Data for the Internet of Things.
[12] Bates was co-founder, President and CTO of Apama, the pioneering streaming analytics company.
[13] Bates has been CTO of IONA Technologies Limited since December 2009 and its Executive Vice President since 2011.
He was a member of the Technology Council at C5 Capital Ltd.[14][15] He was a vice president of Progress Software since 3 May 2011 and served as its Divisional general manager.