Chief Executive Officer
About six years ago, in what seems like another lifetime, JC got sick of making beautiful reports. It didn’t matter how great the intel was or how brilliant the analysis was – delivering a report to even the most senior people in an organisation (or even a government) was NOT the way to make it ‘data driven’. Data needed to stop being a separate workflow and needed to start being part of the existing workflow – it had to be something every single person in the organisation actually used every day to do their job.
Unfortunately for JC, he got quite excited about this and a little product called Wave Analytics – which had just been launched from Salesforce. Forming the first ever Salesforce Analytics practice at Cloud Sherpas, JC and his team threw everything into showing businesses a new way to harness BI into workflow – something which later became widely known as ‘embedded analytics’.
What followed next was a whirlwind five year adventure in which Wave ultimately became Salesforce Einstein Analytics and expanded to become a full AI suite for end users and JC became the global lead for Einstein at one of the world’s largestGSIs. Suddenly JC was flying all over the planet and ‘that crazy Australian guy’ was ranting about everything from “no BS AI” to “how come no one knows how to make coffee around here?”. Working with some of the biggest brands in the world to deliver embedded AI in the cloud opened up a whole new world of cool architecture and real business impact.
Now the crew (who somehow still haven’t gotten sick of JC’s rants) are on a new adventure together at Lightfold. JC is both a founder and the CEO of Lightfold and can honestly say that the best is yet to come. When the journey started, big data was still a hashtag, BI wasn’t cloudy and no one thought graphs were cool. Now we’re talking ‘orbital architectures’, data moves at light speed in zero-g and terabytes spin through cyberspace faster than spreadsheets used to be emailed.The frontier has opened up at long last and we’re not explorers anymore; we’re pioneers..