People to Watch 2019

Oliver Ratzesberger is President and Chief Executive Officer of Teradata. Until January 2019, he served as Teradata’s Chief Operating Officer with global responsibility for Teradata’s operations and led the company’s strategies for go-to-market, products, and services. He joined Teradata’s Board of Directors in November 2018.

Mr. Ratzesberger has an extensive background in analytics, big data, and software development. Prior to Teradata, he worked for both Fortune 500 and early-stage companies, holding positions of increasing responsibility in software development and IT, including leading the expansion of analytics at eBay.

A pragmatic visionary, Oliver frequently speaks and writes about leveraging data and analytics to improve business outcomes. His book with co-author Mohanbir Sawhney, “The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Decision Making,” was published in 2017 and was named on the Best Seller List for the Wall Street Journal.

After six years, the burden of that increased technology debt has reached boardroom level discussions. Leaders are now looking to drastically reduce out-of-control technology silos by finding a simpler, more integrated, yet more capable solution for driving growth and higher- level business outcomes.

At Teradata, we saw this change coming. We have stepped away from being strictly a data warehouse player and have recently released our Vantage platform to bring the next- generation analytics ecosystem to our customers.

Three years ago, many were grappling with how to best leverage the cloud. The benefits of cloud were intriguing, providing users with a new kind of flexibility and experience. Companies were seeking a roadmap to harness these cloudy like capabilities and so we developed Teradata Everywhere. By decoupling our software from our hardware, we provided our customers with ultimate flexibility to port their software investments between on-premise and cloud environments, as the need arose. Teradata Everywhere took the risk out of cloud and architecture decisions, and allowed companies to refocus on business outcomes, rather than one-off tech ecosystems.

Today’s major opportunity with big data and AI is the significant role that algorithms can play to drive autonomous decision-making in the enterprise. The complexity in Teradata’s customers (some of the largest companies in the world) has surpassed human scale and capability. The deficit cannot be made up with more humans working harder – algorithms are the only viable solution and have a much larger role to play. This is the crux of building a “Sentient Enterprise” – an organization with a methodology for connecting analytic power, business practices and human dynamics. At Teradata, we leverage this vision of the Sentient Enterprise to underpin the design of our solutions and deliver an enabling analytic ecosystem – Teradata Vantage.

In contrast, the challenge faced with AI is the misunderstanding that AI implementations will cure “the sins of the past,” such as misuse of data lakes or bad data quality. In fact, the inverse is true: algorithms, AI and deep learning need even better curated data. Algorithms are intensely susceptible to the adage “bad data in, bad decisions out.” This is why we also need the guardrails of a human questioning the validity of the data and outcomes. And with AI’s ability to replicate and scale decision-making (from one decision a day to millions a day), when decisions go wrong, they go wrong by the millions.

Much of my inspiration comes from reading. As you may expect, I spend a lot of time reading about new technology and applications. However, with the Internet, social media and my news feeds, I also find myself delving into diverse topics, from space travel to cosmology, through to nature. I am inspired to think through the implications of these topics on daily life, society and our planet.

I actively combine my technology skills with an interest in caring for our environment and our natural resources. Having two daughters, I am passionate to contribute and leave the world a better place for generations to come. At home, my family and I are heavily invested in alternative and renewable power sources, with a goal to run a carbon neutral household. 100% of our energy is driven through renewable means, we have electric vehicles and take a vested interest in water conservation, particularly important given we live in California where water reserves are limited.