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October 15, 2020

Big Data Career Notes: October 2020 Edition

In this monthly feature, we’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the big data community. Whether it’s a promotion, new company hire, or even an accolade, we’ve got the details. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!


Lewis Black

Actian promoted Lewis Black to the role of chief executive officer. Black began his career at Actian in 2018 under the chief financial officer’s position, where he was responsible for ensuring the company followed best practices and managed its financial division.

“I am honored to step into the role of CEO at Actian and lead the company into its next phase of growth,” said Black. “I have worked closely with Rohit over the last two years and have seen first-hand his commitment to the success of this organization. As we continue to look forward to 2021 and beyond, I am committed to Actian’s strategy, our customers, partners, and employees as we continue to innovate hybrid cloud data analytics, data management, and data integration marketplaces.”

Nicolas Chapman

Teradata appointed Nicolas Chapman to the newly created position of chief strategy officer. Chapman will drive a collaborative environment to develop a strategic plan and an annual operating plan to ensure the company meets its goals. He comes from Imperva Inc., where he served as senior vice president of strategy.

“Teradata’s market position and opportunities are tremendous,” said Chapman. “It’s clear that Teradata has already turned a corner to become focused on providing the very best data analytics solutions for a hybrid, multi-cloud world, and I am committed to ensuring this momentum not only continues – but accelerates. By listening to the market and our customers, we will find new opportunities to grow Teradata by providing value for our customers.”

Mark Cusack

Former vice president of Teradata, Mark Cusack joined Yellowbrick Data as its chief technology officer. He will be responsible for outlining the company’s roadmap and overseeing product development. He will also be responsible for enhancing Yellowbrick Data’s ecosystem partnerships.

“Yellowbrick has a robust product portfolio, strong differentiation with hybrid cloud expertise and unmatched price/performance, a great team, and large enterprise customers who truly are data-driven—I couldn’t ask for a better place to join as CTO,” said Cusack. “This is a pivotal time in the data warehousing space and in the global economy. Business transformation has taken on an urgency and immediacy that simply didn’t exist a few months ago—and enterprises demand dramatic new approaches to data and analytics. I’m excited to do my part here at Yellowbrick and push the boundaries of our technology and the possibilities of our customers.”

Barrett Foster

Matillion appointed Barrett Foster as its chief revenue officer. Foster will manage the company’s revenue operations. He is a software technology executive and most recently served as chief revenue officer at Wrike.  Prior to Wrike, he served as vice president of global sales at BrightEdge.

“Customer success is the top priority of every high-growth enterprise, and at Matillion it leads every decision,” said Foster. “The Matillion team is focused on continuously attracting the best talent and forging bonds with its customers and partners such as Snowflake, Slack, Cisco, and Amazon, which has driven its rapid expansion. Our market opportunity is to help businesses all over the world define and progress on their cloud data journey, as evidenced by our inclusion in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools.”

Brent Goldman

Brent Goldman joined the augmented analytics platform Sisu as vice president of engineering. Brent most recently found and led engineering for Uber’s Self Driving Platform. He also co-founded Uber’s Marketplace Dynamics engineering group.

“The magic of Sisu’s technology struck me from the first time I saw a demo,” said Goldman. “And as I spend more time with the team, the technology, and our customers, I’m continually wowed by the culture, focus, and drive of this team. At Uber, I helped transform and optimize transportation; at Sisu, I plan to carry that passion to optimize every industry with data, using the power of the Sisu platform.”

Kevin Greene

Kevin Greene succeeds Steven Schneider as chief executive officer of Logi Analytics. Schneider will continue to serve on the board of directors of Logi Analytics and will serve under the role of executive chairman. In 2013, Greene started at Logi Analytics, serving as vice president of Business Development and was promoted to chief operating officer in May 2017.

“I’m honored by the opportunity to lead such a great team. Steven first joined the Logi Analytics family as a customer. After joining Logi through acquisition, he built our global sales organization and then served as chief product officer and chief operating officer before ascending to CEO. All along the way, he’s helped build Logi Analytics into the market leader and global company it is today,” said Greene. “Under Steven’s leadership, Logi established a bold vision, a clear mission, and a proven business model as the embedded analytics industry-leader with the financial results to prove it.”

Randall Jackson

ScyllaDB appointed Randall Jackson to the newly created position of chief revenue officer. Jackson brings over a 20-year career in open source, NoSQL, and enterprise go-to-market strategy. Before ScyllaDB, he held the role of vice president of North America Enterprise Sales for MongoDB.

“ScyllaDB’s enterprise traction, innovative products, and superior performance present a huge opportunity to gain market share,” Jackson said. “I’m excited to lead this team and apply what I’ve learned serving a diverse customer base and helping them solve their critical business problems, as well as driving revenue growth and strategy for uniquely impactful high-tech companies.”

Jamie Kiser

Talend announced that Jamie Kiser is expanding her leadership role to chief operating officer and chief customer officer.  As COO, Jamie will manage its IT, security, and business transformation and strategy teams. She will also continue her existing responsibilities as CCO managing customer relations.

“I am honored to accept this expanded role at Talend,” said Kiser. “As a customer-first organization, we are committed to showing up for our customers in a way that helps them use data to transform their business and make real-time decisions. We have amazing customer and operations teams in place at Talend, and I look forward to helping us maintain efficiencies as we continue to grow and better serve organizations that rely on trusted data to grow, adapt, and drive business value.”

Brian Owen

Brian D. Owen joined Cambridge Semantics as its chief executive officer. Owen succeeds Chuck Pieper, who will be staying on as chairman of the board. Owen has over a 30-years career driving corporate strategy, mission, and purpose. He has held executive roles at r4 Technologies, SunGard, ORACLE Corporation, MapInfo, and Computer Associates.

“I am delighted to join Chuck Pieper and the Cambridge Semantics team in this important role at a time of great opportunity for the company,” Owen said. “The market for modern, graph-based data fabrics is exploding, and I look forward to working with the team to dramatically grow our customer base worldwide and to build on the vision to deliver breakthrough data integration and analytics solutions that help customers achieve more than they thought possible.”

Carrie Palin, John Sabino, and Christian Smith

Splunk announced the promotion of Carrie Palin, John Sabino, and Christian Smith to leadership positions. Palin will continue to serve under the vice president and chief marketing officer’s role and will now report to Doug Merritt, the chief executive officer. She has been with the company since February 2019.

Sabino started at Splunk in 2017 and will be promoted to chief customer officer from his role as senior vice president of Customer Success. Smith joined the company in June 2019 as senior vice president of Global Sales. He was promoted to the chief revenue officer role.

Henning Smith

Luminoso promoted Henning Smith to chief technology officer. Smith started at the company as head of engineering in 2019 and was quickly promoted to vice president of engineering. He has a 20-year career in managing and developing engineering teams in dispersed locations, most recently leading a team of engineers at Cisco and CA Technologies.

“During my time at Luminoso, I have been incredibly impressed with everyone’s commitment to ensuring that we’re delivering the highest-quality text analytics applications to all of our customers,” said Henning. “As Chief Technology Officer, I look forward to overseeing the development and delivery of the next generation of Luminoso’s text analytics applications.”

Ron Spratt and Ben Kennedy

BigID announced the additions of Ron Spratt and Ben Kennedy as senior vice president of sales for North America and as area vice president of sales for the West. Kennedy and Spratt come from Informatica and bring deep data sales experience. Spratt will oversee all field sales activities in the region. He brings over two decades of sales and leadership experience in enterprise software.

Kennedy will manage sales initiatives in the West region of the United States. Ben has a 15-year career in enterprise software. Kennedy has also worked at Social Finance and Transmeta, and held senior sales positions at SoFi and Oracle.

Krishna Tammana

Talend appointed former vice president of engineering at Splunk Krishna Tammana as its chief technology officer. Tammana will be overseeing the product and engineering divisions to accelerate innovation and the company’s continued market growth.

“It’s a great time to be joining Talend. This is a pivotal moment in both the data market and the company’s evolution,” said Tammana. “Talend has the leadership, talent, and commitment needed to become a critical and strategic business partner that companies can run their businesses on. I look forward to working with the entire executive team in carrying that vision forward.”

Steven Totman

Data privacy platform provider Privitar appointed Steven Totman as its chief product officer. Totman will manage the company’s product strategy and deployment. He comes from Cloudera, where he held the role of managing director of financial services. Totman holds several patents in data integration and metadata-related designs.

“Looking back on my career, I’ve always been passionate about the legal and ethical use of data. The impact of data-driven analytics and insights can be profound, but so too are the challenges associated with ensuring sensitive data remains safe and usable,” said Totman. “Privitar has a world-class team, industry-leading technologies, an incredibly strong infrastructure, and a massive amount of potential. I’m confident that in joining forces, we will take the Privitar Data Privacy Platform to the next level, supporting organizations worldwide as they embrace privacy ops to ensure that one hundred percent of their data is available for critical use cases, including analytics and machine learning.”


To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, click here.

Do you know someone that should be included in next month’s list? If so, send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.

 

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