Our Authors

Yellowbrick Blog Authors

Yellowbrick authors write compelling stories about cutting edge technologies & trends, people, products, events, and topic that is valuable to our customers, employees and partners.

HR Business Partner/Office Manager

Alice joined Yellowbrick at the start of 2022 as an HR Business Partner/Office Manager to support the EMEA team. Yellowbrick has been Alice’s introduction to Tech. She previously worked as an HR generalist in the public sector for over 3 years and is CIPD qualified.

Alice is based in London and in her spare time, she loves traveling, yoga, and all things outdoors. She is also a big foodie and loves exploring new places.

VP, Strategic Business Development & Alliances

Allen is the VP, Strategic Business Development & Alliances at Yellowbrick. He has over 30 years of industry experience in a wide range of markets including cloud, semiconductors, storage, mobile, and embedded. He holds a degree in Solid State Physics from San Jose State University.

Prior to Yellowbrick Allen served 20 years at Intel, where he was recruited to aid in the formation of Numonyx as the VP of Worldwide Wireless Sales and VP Americas Sales and Marketing. Allen joined Micron Technology in May 2010 through the acquisition of Numonyx, where he held a variety of VP Sales and Business Unit Marketing roles. He recently served as the VP Marketing and Platform Alliances at ClearDB.

When he’s not chasing partnerships or deals, Allen is a home remodeler with a passion for tile work and an avid golfer.

Principal Technical Writer

Bob joined Yellowbrick Data in 2016 and started developing the product documentation from scratch. He began his high-tech career over 30 years ago, working as an editor for a company on Castro Street, just up the road from the new Yellowbrick office.

Bob grew up about 25 miles south of London and frequently goes back to England to visit his brothers and sister. At home in San Jose, he spends lots of time with his wife and family, but also enjoys watching the Premier League, directing Shakespeare plays, listening to jazz and drinking Scotch whisky.

Director of Sales Development

Bryson Boatwright is the Director of Sales Development at Yellowbrick. He has over 8 years of experience as a hands-on and data-driven Sales Development Leader at startups with unique product offerings. He is capable of building successful teams from scratch, implementing process, and developing skillsets while improving culture within a results-driven environment. He enjoys weekend rounds of golf and trying new restaurants and bars after recently moving to San Diego.

Yellowbrick Cloud Operations

Christopher Edgar is a Technologist with over 20+ years of experience in the tech industry. He has worked on a variety of groundbreaking projects in several industries including Finance, Real Estate, Post Production, Visual FX, Flash Memory Development, and most recently, the MPP Analytics Database provider, Yellowbrick Data. In his off time, he finds opportunities to give back to the community by mentoring youth through programs like the Scouts BSA program and the FIRST Tech Challenge.

At home, he enjoys performing fire dances with his spouse and loves playing video games with his two children while their three dogs try to sit on his lap all at once.

Cloud Security Architect

Ryan Atkinson is the Cloud Security Architect at Yellowbrick with over 20 years of experience in software development and architecture. He studied computer science at Brigham Young University. Ryan’s experience includes identity and access management security as well as identity data privacy and security.

Senior Staff QA Engineer

David has an extensive background in Quality Assurance and enjoys getting paid to break things – although sometimes it is unintentional. He loves taking on big challenges, especially when trying to reproduce super difficult edge conditions that others have been unable to recreate. His other full-time job is being a husband and father to two boys, one girl, and a Maltipoo. Outside of work, David enjoys camping, hiking, and fishing. He’s also a fan of the Golden State Warriors, SF Giants, SF 49ers, and the SJ Sharks.

System Integration and Test Engineer

Drew Gillies is a System Integration and Test Engineer at Yellowbrick. He studied Spanish in University but after learning to code on the internet, he decided to pursue coding instead of teaching Spanish. He learned to code JavaScript at first from freecodecamp.org with front-end development and got a data-engineer position working with Python initially. Then he moved over to Yellowbrick using Python and Bash very heavily. Drew enjoys solving problems with software that can scale.

Drew loves board sports and computers. He can be found skateboarding at the skate park, wakeboarding on the lake, or benchmarking what his enthusiast-grade hardware can do. Drew is a left-handed triplet who grew up in a small town in Northern Utah named Brigham City and lived in Santiago, Chile for a few years. He’s a fair weather hiker who enjoys exploring southern Utah when on vacation.

Vice President and General Manager EMEA

Gary is the Vice President and General Manager EMEA at Yellowbrick. In his 35 years in the software industry, Gary has led, managed, and transformed a number of successful direct and indirect businesses. With successful leadership positions in small, medium, and large organizations, he has demonstrated steep and sustainable growth, regularly achieving over 150 – 200% year over year.

In his free time, Gary enjoys spending time with his two young sons, playing golf when he gets time, and walking his dog around his farm.

Founder and CEO at Amalgam Insights

Hyoun Park is the Founder and CEO of Amalgam Insights. He focuses on technology expense and data strategy challenges based on 20+ years of vendor, enterprise IT, and industry analyst experience.

Prior to Amalgam Insights, Hyoun led IT analyst practices at the Aberdeen Group and Blue Hill Research with over 300 research documents across analytics, mobility, finance, and collaboration; managed multi-million-dollar technology budgets at Bose and Teradyne; supported billing data operations for two resale telecom CLECs; and built prediction models for the first Fantasy Baseball website, mosey.com.

Chief Operating Officer

Prior to Yellowbrick, Jason was the Vice President of Business Operations and Customer Engagement for the Enterprise Division at SanDisk, where he led the tactical and strategic planning for supply and demand. Jason joined SanDisk in 2014 through the acquisition of Fusion-io, where he was Senior Vice President of Operations. He was responsible for day-to-day operations including business operations and planning, global procurement, supply chain planning, manufacturing, logistics and customer program management.

He joined Fusion-io in January 2011 as Vice President of Corporate Development, responsible for M&A strategy, execution and strategic planning activities. Prior to Fusion-io, Jason held various roles at Micron, Numonyx and Intel in Strategic Business Development, Corporate Development and Product Development. He began his career in the RF industry working for TRW and Powerwave Technologies in product design, development and management.

Jason earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and holds seven United States patents.

Chief Engineer

Jim Peterson works as a chief engineer for Yellowbrick Data, a startup providing hybrid cloud data warehouses. With over 35 years of experience in the management of computer software and hardware development, his specialty for the last 10 years has been databases and flash storage.

Prior to joining Yellowbrick, he worked as an architect for Fusion-io / SanDisk. Before Fusion-io, Peterson worked at Catalytic / Agility Design Systems on hardware and software compilation. He spent three years at Remedy as the VP and GM of the Core Product Unit, where he managed the combined platform, applications, and marketing teams for newband enhanced Remedy products.

Before Remedy, Jim directed engineering efforts for various Adobe Systems products, including FrameMaker and PostScript. Before Adobe, he lead or designed various software and hardware products, including digital and mix-signal ASICs.

He has a bachelor’s degree in applied physics from Caltech, as well as a master’s degree in engineering from UCLA.

Senior Accountant

Keerti joined Yellowbrick in 2022 as a Senior Accountant supporting the global Finance team. Yellowbrick has been Keerti’s introduction to working in a mid-stage, fast-paced, dynamic start-up, something that was always on her bucket list since she moved to Silicon Valley in 2009. She previously worked with tax firms including KPMG, in the revenue team of a public company, and has consulted with small start-ups in Finance. Based out of Silicon Valley, Keerti does daily yoga and meditation, plays the guitar, is an Indian classical kathak dancer, and is currently training for her 7th half marathon.

VP of Research at Eckerson Group

Kevin’s passion is to decipher what technology means to business leaders and practitioners. He has invested 25 years in technology, as an industry analyst, writer, instructor, product marketer, and services leader. A frequent public speaker and accomplished writer, Kevin has a decade of experience in data management and analytics.

He launched, built and led a profitable data services team for EMC Pivotal in the Americas and EMEA, implementing data warehouse and data lake platforms for Fortune 2000 enterprises. More recently he ran field training at the data integration software provider Attunity, now part of Qlik.

Kevin has co-authored two books, Streaming Change Data Capture: A Foundation for Modern Data Architectures, OReilly 2018, and Apache Kafka Transaction Data Streaming for Dummies, Wiley 2019. He also serves as data management instructor at eLearningCurve. Kevin has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and MBA from the University of California at Berkeley. A bookworm and outdoor fitness nut, Kevin enjoys kayaking, mountain biking and skiing with his wife and three boys.

Chief Technology Officer

Mark Cusack is the CTO at Yellowbrick. Mark has worked in the data warehousing and advanced analytics space for the past 20 years. He was a co-founding developer at the data warehouse archiving company RainStor, which was acquired by Teradata in 2014. Mark holds a PhD in computational physics. Mark has worked in academia, government, startups and enterprises over the course of his career.

Mark is a keen runner. He prefers to race the 5K distance, but will also tackle 10K, half-marathons and the occasional full marathon if pushed. He also boxes and skis – although not generally at the same time.

VP & Research Director, Ventana Research

Over two decades of experience covering digital technology, with a specific focus on emerging data in operations and analytics technology and processes. Matt leads the expertise in Digital Technology covering applications and technology that improve the readiness and resilience of business and IT operations.

His focus areas of expertise and market coverage include: analytics and data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, blockchain, cloud computing, collaborative and conversational computing, extended reality, Internet of Things, mobile computing and robotic automation.

Software Engineer Query Planning and Optimisation

Maxence is a Software Engineer at Yellowbrick Data, working on the planner and query optimization team. Although Maxence initially pursued data science, he eventually changed his focus to more math and performance-oriented work. He enjoys the challenge of developing complex software systems and is always looking for ways to improve his coding skills.

In his free time, Maxence enjoys practicing photography, hiking in the nearby French mountains, and cooking with his friends.

CEO of Intelligent Business Strategies

Mike Ferguson is Managing Director of Intelligent Business Strategies Limited. As an independent IT industry analyst and consultant, he specialises in BI / analytics and data management. With over 40 years of IT experience, Mike has consulted for dozens of companies on BI/Analytics, data strategy, technology selection, data architecture, and data management. Mike is also conference chairman of Big Data LDN, the fastest growing data and analytics conference in Europe.

He has spoken at events all over the world and written numerous articles. Formerly he was a principal and co-founder of Codd and Date Europe Limited – the inventors of the Relational Model, a Chief Architect at Teradata on the Teradata DBMS.

He teaches popular master classes in Data Warehouse Modernisation, Big Data Fundamentals, Centralised Data Governance of a Distributed Data Landscape, Building, Creating Data Products in a Data Mesh, Data Lake or Lakehouse for use in Analytics, Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics, Real-time Analytics, and Data Virtualisation.

Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder

Neil co-founded Yellowbrick after having held CTO and Chief Architect positions at companies large and small, including Fusion-io, Dell, Everdream and BMC Software. He currently serves as Yellowbrick’s CEO and de-facto chief architect.

Neil is a native of the UK and loves traveling, woodworking and cooking. He has a passion for experiencing different cultures and speaks five languages including fluency in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Head of Product

Before joining Yellowbrick as Head of Product, Nick ran Product Management at Pure1 for Pure Storage. There he led a number of product and technology teams delivering cloud-based analytics and monitoring for physical and virtual storage appliances. Nick has worked at Palm, HP and Yahoo on a wide range of enterprise and consumer hardware and software products from Semantic Web Ontologies to Operating Systems and mobile handsets.

Nick is a keen builder of increasingly large items, from useful furniture to obscure classic European cars. When stuck he loves to run, with half marathons and multi-day events being his favorite.

Principal Engineer

Paritosh works on the architecture and design of silicon accelerators at Yellowbrick. He has worked in Silicon Valley for over 25 years and has designed various chips during that time – micro-processors, server interconnect, flash controllers and application specific accelerators. He has been at Yellowbrick for over 6 years – the longest he’s been at any company.

 

In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, traveling, tending to his garden and collection of indoor plants, baking sourdough bread and exploring all things related to wine – learning, tasting, and collecting. He enjoys the challenge of blind tasting wine and is working on getting better at it.

Quality Engineer

Henry has been breaking SQL databases for 24 years. He loves writing programs to create hordes of random tests and using the tests to expose hundreds of bugs. He has enjoyed his six years at Yellowbrick.

He likes traveling, reading science fiction, and building fires at the beach. He collects and mails postcards; often on a trip, he’ll mail 50 to 100 postcards to family and friends. He wrote a program to help with Wordle and can now solve the puzzle in ten seconds or less. Henry and his wife are the parents of four children and have fostered twenty children.

Ramnath Sagar Headshot

Director of Product Marketing

Ramnath Sai Sagar is the Director of Product Marketing at Yellowbrick. He previously led the marketing at Inpher, a startup that empowers organizations to unlock the value of their sensitive data, and at Pure Storage, focusing on their AI and analytics solutions. Prior to making the switch to Product Marketing, he could be found on the technical side doing research for some of the premier research projects in European labs – Brain Mind Institute (BMI) at EFPL, Switzerland, and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. He has a solid technical background in storage, networking, data privacy, AI, and analytics, with 15+ publications in leading conferences and journals.

In his spare time, Ramnath enjoys spending time with his wife and two kids, and building his motorcycle with his daughter.

Technical Advisor

Richard Soundy worked at Sybase and SAP for 24 years, working in Engineering roles with SAP ASE and SAP IQ. He was with SAP IQ since the original product was purchased by Sybase back in the early 90s and has worked with IQ in Engineering, Marketing, Business Development, and Evangelism.

Richard took early retirement from SAP as the EMEA Director in the SAP Enterprise Systems Group in 2015. Since his retirement, he has been consulting with data warehouse companies and their products, where his knowledge of IQ and the market can be usefully employed.

Software Engineer, Query Planning and Optimization

Morgane is a Software Engineer at Yellowbrick, working on planner optimization.

She started coding in high school as a challenge, after someone told her she wouldn’t be able to, and hasn’t stopped since then. Originally from France, she joined Yellowbrick after graduating, firstly in the London office and now remotely, having moved back to France.

When she isn’t working, Morgane spends most of her time playing video games, drawing or traveling to new locations with her camera.

Chief Marketing Officer

Tim Young is the Chief Marketing Officer at Yellowbrick. He is a sales-savvy data-driven marketing leader with 25 years of experience in data warehousing, machine learning, analytics, and enterprise applications. He is a category creator and has run marketing organizations for pre-IPO startups, including DataRobot and Netezza, and large global enterprises, including Oracle, IBM, and Workday.

VP of Engineering

Torben has been in the tech industry for more than 30 years and joined Yellowbrick early in 2015 as a software developer. He is currently overseeing software & hardware engineering worldwide as Vice President. During his career, Torben has spent the majority of his time at the lower parts of the stack, leading numerous teams working with kernels, drivers, embedded open-source systems, and the inner workings of networking stacks. Based in Denmark, his career spans many global companies working in the fields of storage, server design, green tech, IT, and databases.

In his spare time, Torben enjoys spending time with his wife and two sons, fishing, video gaming, and tinkering with electronics.

Head of Product Marketing

Umair heads up Product Marketing for Yellowbrick – an innovator in enterprise data warehousing. He has over 20 years of experience helping organizations to build effective data and analytics solutions and strategies – working with large enterprises and with solution vendors such as DATAllegro, Microsoft. Dell EMC and Yellowbrick.

Title: Principal Engineer

Kurt Westerfeld joined Yellowbrick as Principal Engineer in 2015. He has over 30 years of industry experience specializing in enterprise software. Since 1991, he has worked in a number of startups, including Managed Objects as CTO. He joined the Yellowbrick team to help with the development of database management and user interface.

Kurt enjoys traveling, cooking, trying new foods, spending time with his wife and four children, and playing with his two dogs. Kurt is also an avid jazz fan and loves to find live music in clubs.

Yellowbrick

Yellowbrick is revolutionizing the world of data analytics with the world’s most flexible cloud native data warehouse. Organizations of all sizes rely on Yellowbrick to get answers to their hardest business questions, power their decision-making, and get real-time insights at a fraction of the cost of alternatives.

Yellowbrick offers superior price/performance for every business use-case, along with the unique ability to run analytic workloads in public or private clouds, at the network edge, or any combination with the choice of usage based pricing or predictable fixed cost subscription.

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Faster
Run analytics 10 to 100x FASTER to achieve analytic insights that have never been possible.

Simpler to Manage
Configure, load and query billions of rows in minutes.

Economical
Shrink your data warehouse footprint by as much as 97% and save millions in operational and management costs.

Accessible Anywhere
Achieve high speed analytics in your data center or in any cloud.