The Right Ingredients for Success, Port Gear

By August 14, 2025February 25th, 2026Articles
Image of container yard where shipping container movement is optimized

At TOC Europe 2025, we jumped at the opportunity to get a line on recent changes and developments at Tideworks from its President Thomas J. Rucker. Among others, we talked about the new ownership status, leadership changes, what the company is cooking up for its terminal operating system (TOS), the ingredients for building relationships on trust and hands-on knowledge, data, and artificial intelligence (AI).

How is Tideworks driving evolution with ownership and leadership changes?

In 2019, Tideworks entered its next phase of growth following Blackstone Infrastructure Partners’ majority investment in Carrix, Tideworks’ parent company.

With the introduction of Blackstone, Tideworks has entered an exciting period of growth and innovation. To fuel this transition, we’ve doubled down on markets and products with the greatest growth potential, bringing in seasoned leaders to guide the way, including Frederik Stork who leads the professional services division, Subbu Bhat as VP of software engineering, and Julian Galvis who’s leading go-to-market strategy for our next wave of innovation and market expansion.

Tideworks continues to focus on its core strengths, intermodal rail being one of them. Many of our projects and investments target that business, primarily across the US, and we’ve begun developing our platform to accommodate new areas, such as Australia and Europe. We are building on our strong foundation in the UK through our 15-year partnership with Freightliner which has our rail TOS solutions deployed in its terminal network across England and Scotland.

Read the full article on Port Gear pages 20-21.

Mark Traynor

Chief Product & Technology Officer

Mark Traynor joined Tideworks in 2026 as Chief Product & Technology Officer, bringing more than two decades of hands-on experience in building and deploying terminal technology and automation systems. In this role Mark will lead the company’s product management and engineering organizations and is responsible for the product roadmap and the modernization of the Tideworks platform.

Before Tideworks, Mark was Chief Technology Officer at Lynxis, whose Nascent gate automation systems deployed in nearly 100 marine and rail terminals across North and South America. For Lynxis, Mark led a globally distributed 70+ person engineering team that built a modern, configuration-driven platform on a single codebase while introducing a visual workflow configuration designed to streamline customer implementations. He also introduced cutting-edge computer vision and agentic AI solutions as well as the re-engineering of the hardware to run on readily available commercial components rather than bespoke systems sourced from specialist manufacturers.

For the 13 years before that, Mark was an independent technology partner to major North American automated marine terminal projects, including Virginia International Terminals and Long Beach Container Terminal. These operators relied on him to help lead their most complex terminal operating system implementations driving efficiency and reliability through their gate, rail, yard and vessel operations.

Mark began his career at Navis in 2004, delivering terminal operating system implementations across North America and Europe.