Ahead of its annual gala dinner next week, the Data 50 Awards, the UK’s premier initiative for celebrating data leadership and excellence, today unveils a category for global data leaders for the first time.
Among the 300+ nominations submitted for this year’s Data 50 programme were a number of data leaders who may not be based in the UK but who have contributed to the UK’s data economy and had a global impact.
All functions involved in driving data innovation in the UK were considered for this year’s Data 50 list, including the vendors creating the technology, the end-users deploying it, and the consultancies and integrators that get deployments over the line.
Last month, Information Age revealed the 50 people who made this year’s list. Today, eight global data leaders are also inducted into the programme. One of them will be revealed as the ‘best in class’ global leader at the Data 50 Awards ceremony on 18 May at the Montcalm London Marble Arch.
>See also: The UK’s top 50 data leaders 2017
The awards honour people and firms at the forefront of data – those transforming organisations and enhancing decision-making through its use, managing and controlling its proliferating growth, and driving business value.
The Data 50 Awards ceremony is a must-attend event for the UK’s data community, attended by hundreds of the top leaders and influencers. Click here to book your place at the ceremony.
N.B: The entrepreneurs are listed alphabetically, not ranked in order of achievement.
1. Dean Stoecker, Alteryx
Dean Stoecker is the CEO and chairman of Alteryx, as well as one of the three co-founders. He is a driving force behind the company’s focus on empowering line-of-business analysts through self-service data analytics. Stoecker’s interests lie in spatial technology, business intelligence and solving hard analytic problems. With more than 400 employees in nine offices around the world (two launched last year in Europe), Stoecker has recruited a strong leadership team and board of directors to help drive the continued success of the company. Alteryx has earned the trust of customers including many of the world’s largest and best known brands, such as Experian, Kaiser, Ford and McDonald’s, to growing organisations such as Rosenblatt Securities, Vertix and ConsumerOrbit.
2. Guy White, Catalyx
Catalyx was launched in 2013 with the aim of using data-driven innovation to harness the power of crowds. Jaded by their experience of traditional marketing, the company’s founders, including CEO Guy White, decided to pursue a different path: to find better ways to collect the opinions and intelligence of millions of end-users, and to put it to use developing high-quality, consumer-centric products. Catalyx’s approach to business intelligence has become popular with global clients such as Logitech, Medtronic, Carlsberg and Head & Shoulders. Data informs every aspect of Catalyx’s work. Its approach is designed to facilitate superior planning, tracking and insight gathering – giving its clients the ability to create, develop, and iterate concepts and content.
3. John Gentry, Virtual Instruments
As CTO at Virtual Instruments, John Gentry has become the ‘voice of the customer’ within the organisation. He joined in 2009 and has since played a significant role in shaping the company’s solutions, message and product vision. Based on his insights, John and his team develop and hone the Virtual Instruments’ product suite, comprising VirtualWisdom, Load DynamiX Enterprise and more recently Xangati. It’s designed to give a complete end-to-end view of performance across the infrastructure – from storage through to applications, as well as deep server, IP network, virtualisation layer and cloud monitoring. This visibility helps customers to understand how its infrastructure is performing – and enables them to spot opportunities to improve overall performance and manage operations as workload conditions change or data volumes increase, for example.
4. Manu Mathew, Visual IQ
Manu Mathew founded marketing intelligence firm Visual IQ with Anto Chittilappilly in 2006. Having created the industry’s first algorithmic attribution solution, the company is continuously working to transform the way marketers buy media and connect with consumers. Visual IQ’s platform was the first to combine and analyse data from both online and offline channels to offer an all-encompassing approach for understanding marketing performance; the first to offer a media spend recommendation product, which elevated the science of attribution from analysis to optimisation; the first to bridge the gap between media performance and audience characteristics; and the first to automatically push attributed metrics into media buying execution platforms. Through its rich history of innovation, Visual IQ has paved the way for marketers to connect the dots between marketing and business outcomes.
5. Martin Darling, MapR Technologies
Martin Darling is vice president at MapR Technologies. He has a successful track record of cultivating high-impact sales and marketing teams and building sustainable, high-performance sales operations across the globe. As an organisation, MapR helps companies to create disruptive advantage and long-term value from their data with its converged data platform. The central innovation that underpins the platform is a unique architecture designed specifically for business-critical applications, seamless big data access and integration, and the ability to run in real-time both operational and analytical processing and applications reliably on one platform. MapR is the first and only platform that combines Hadoop with Spark, storage, NoSQL and streaming capabilities on one unified cluster to create global real-time data applications. American Express, Audi, Credit Agricole, Ericsson, HelloFresh, Novartis, and Paysafe are among the customers benefiting from production deployments of MapR.
6. Moshe Yanai, Infinidat
A veteran of the data storage industry, Moshe Yanai made a name for himself at EMC by building EMC Symmetrix to help the company shift its focus from memory to enterprise storage. His innovation helped transform EMC from a company on the verge of bankruptcy to an enterprise worth $200 billion dollars in 2000. After leaving EMC, Moshe founded XIV, a company designed to deliver the simplest storage to manage in the market. IBM acquired the company in 2008 and Moshe retired shortly after. One day, however, a computational biologist for a genomics research lab told Moshe that the biggest problem in his lab had nothing to do with biology. Instead, it involved storing the bits and bytes from his sequencing machine. Genomics had become a data storage problem – storage was holding back the scientific mission. That was enough to nudge Moshe out of retirement, as he knew all too well that the issue impacted many more vertical markets too. He founded Infinidat and reached out to his network of storage developers. A few years and over 130 storage patents later, Moshe brought his highly innovative storage array to market in 2013 with the record delivery of over 500PB shipped by Q3 2016.
7. Matthew Brennan, VirtualArmour
As president of VirtualArmour, Matthew Brennan is delivering on the direction and growth of the company. He is critical in influencing and maintaining VirtualArmour’s record of customer relation, problem resolution and customer retention. As VirtualArmour is a public company, Brennan is also responsible for addressing its investors and analysts. Prior to his promotion to president, he oversaw revenue growth of 69% from 2014 to 2015 as VP of sales. VirtualArmour is an information technology company that provides advanced network and cybersecurity solutions that incorporate a wide range of managed services, professional services and software development. By working with well-established and respected technology partners in network appliance, software and systems, VirtualArmour provides advanced network and cyber security support. Its services run 24/7 through leveraging highly-trained engineers through a primary NOC located in Middlesborough, UK and a secondary NOC located in Salt Lake City, UT.
8. Peter Linas, Bullhorn
Peter Linas serves as international managing director at US-based CRM software firm Bullhorn. The company provides a customer-centric, fully scalable, enterprise-level relationship management (CRM) solution for recruitment and other customer-obsessed companies. The solution is built on top of a complete, end-to-end SaaS platform, and powered by advanced automatic data capture and analytics. While new features and functionality enhancements are released monthly, the CRM’s primary competitive differentiator is its ability to automatically capture data and translate it into relationship insight at the point of need. This means users can act quickly on business opportunities without the burden of manual input, saving them both time and cost. The development of Bullhorn’s professional services team is a testament to the company’s belief that success with data-driven systems relies on more than just great products.
