Revolutionary Leadership
Revolution Analytics Management
Dave Rich
Chief Executive Officer
Dave Rich is CEO at Revolution Analytics. His areas of expertise are in new business development, managing large scale global change programs and the preparation, transition, and management of outsourcing contracts. Among many roles at Accenture, his most recent role was the Global Managing Director at Accenture Analytics where he responsible for driving the company’s investments in predictive analytics solutions.
Dave is a frequent contributor of quotes and bylined articles to BusinessWeek, Forbes, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and other business publications, and has presented to C-level leadership forums including the World Customs Organization, SAS Global Forum, and Business Leader Conference in Brazil and Eastern Europe. Dave is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with a Bachelor of Science degree in Management and Technology. He resides in Fort Worth, Texas and enjoys spending time with his wife, eight children, and three grandchildren.
David Champagne
Chief Technology Officer
David Champagne is a top software architect, programmer and product manager with over 20 years experience in enterprise and web application development for business customers across a wide range of industries. As Principal Architect/Engineer for SPSS, Champagne led the development teams, created and led the text mining architecture team and was responsible for a variety of open source initiatives. Prior to that, he served as Vice President of Software Engineering for LexiQuest, in charge of software development, quality assurance and publications for the company's entire product line. Earlier in his career, Champagne was a systems engineer for Honeywell, and was also a free-lance software consultant. He is a 1984 graduate of Southern Illinois University.
Jeff Erhardt
Chief Operating Officer
Jeff Erhardt is an executive with extensive and diverse experience at Fortune 400 companies in technology, operations, finance, strategy, and M&A. He began his career at Advanced Micro Devices where he was responsible for the development and commercialization of leading-edge semiconductor devices, eventually authoring more than 30 United States patents. In this capacity, Erhardt was an expert user of numerous statistics and analytics tools—including R—and directed the creation of an innovative, fully-integrated analysis infrastructure to accelerate the development and introduction of new semiconductor technologies. Most recently, Erhardt played a central role in the multi-billion dollar restructuring of Spansion, where he advised on operational and performance improvements as well as structured, negotiated, and led numerous multinational transactions. Erhardt graduated with a B.S. in Engineering Cum Laude, from Cornell University and an M.B.A. with honors from The Wharton School.
Lee Edlefsen
Chief Scientist
Prior to joining Revolution, Lee Edlefsen was CEO and co-founder of ExaMetrix, the producer of ExaStat, an open source environment for analyzing huge data sets. Previously, he served as Vice President of Development for the Data Analysis Products Division at MathSoft (now TIBCO Software). Edlefsen co-founded, grew, and sold two successful software companies, Aptech Systems—the producers of the GAUSS Mathematical and Statistical System, and TriMetrix—the creators of the Axum technical graphics and data analysis package. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Sue Ranney
Vice President, Product Development
Sue Ranney oversees Revolution Analytics' product planning and execution throughout the product lifecycle. She was co-founder of ExaMetrix, the producer of the ExaStat open source environment for analyzing huge data sets. Ranney also served as vice president of development for the data analysis products division at MathSoft (now TIBCO Software), where she co-managed S-Plus releases, and was the co-founder of TriMetrix —the creators of the Axum technical graphics and data analysis package. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
David Smith
Vice President, Marketing
David Smith has a long history with the R and statistics communities. After graduating with a degree in Statistics from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, he spent four years researching statistical methodology at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, where he also developed a number of packages for the S-PLUS statistical modeling environment. He continued his association with S-PLUS at Insightful (now TIBCO Spotfire) overseeing the product management of S-PLUS and other statistical and data mining products. David smith is the co-author (with Bill Venables) of the popular tutorial manual, An Introduction to R, and one of the originating developers of the ESS: Emacs Speaks Statistics project. Today, David leads marketing for REvolution R, supports R communities worldwide, and is responsible for the Revolutions blog. Prior to joining Revolution Analytics, David served as vice president of product management at Zynchros, Inc.
Richard Kittler
Vice President, Professional Services
Richard Kittler comes to Revolution with significant enterprise IT experience in leading the development of large scale analytics applications involving both R and SAS, and their integration through ETL with commercial data warehouses. Much of this experience was gained at semiconductor manufacturers AMD and Globalfoundries where he was most recently Director/Fellow of Engineering Analysis Systems responsible for analytics to support ramping new products and technologies in volume manufacturing, tracing yield excursions to root cause, and improving productivity of the Design Enablement operation. Prior to this Kittler was SVP of Product Development at Yield Dynamics, a software startup building yield management software for the semiconductor and flat panel industries. He holds a doctorate in Physics from UC Berkeley, and undergraduate degrees in Math and Physics. Kittler is currently responsible for Revolution's Professional Services involving consulting and training to support successful adoption and use of Revolution's software products.
Revolution Analytics Board of Directors
Dave Rich, CEO
Revolution Analytics
Robert Gentleman has been an innovator in the statistical computing world for more than 20 years. In 1996, he and fellow University of Aukland (NZ) professor Ross Ihaka released the “R” statistical computing language as a free software package after five years of development. The goal was to offer technology better suited for their statistics students, who needed to analyze data and produce graphical models of the information. Today, R is used by over 2 million people both in academic and commercial settings, and has become the de facto standard for predictive analytics. In addition to his role on the Revolution Analytics board, Gentleman is a senior director in bioinformatics at Genentech (a member of the Roche Group). In his academic career, he has received multiple research grants and has published more than two dozen articles on statistical computing. He holds a BS in mathematics from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Basil Horangic is a partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, which he joined in 2007 to help open the California office—moving from Austin Ventures in Texas, where he was a General Partner. Previously, he held a variety of positions with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, and Oak Investment Partners. As an investor, Basil is active up and down the hardware stack, from materials, tools, and manufacturing equipment up to systems, semis, and devices. His companies have sold into network, enterprise, consumer, industrial and healthcare markets. Basil has started two companies, and successfully incubated four others. Basil is a graduate of MIT with a BS in Computer Science, a BS in Economics, and an MS in Operations Research. He received an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Donald Nickelson has been the director of First Advantage, a risk management consultancy, since 2003. In addition to his role at First Advantage, he serves as vice chairman and director of Harbour Group Industries, a leveraged buy-out firm. Nickelson is also director of the Adolor Corporation, where he is a member of the compensation and audit committees. In addition, he is on the advisory board of Celtic Pharmaceutical Holdings and also serves as chairman of the advisory board of Celtic Therapeutics. Previously, Mr. Nickelson served as President of PaineWebber Group, an investment banking and brokerage firm, and served on the boards of numerous public and private companies.
Norman H. Nie is Senior Advisor for Products and Strategy. Nie supports Revolution Analytics’ efforts to broaden the use of the R statistics language to galvanize a predictive analytics market he helped create over 30 years ago as the co-founder of SPSS. He served as president and CEO of SPSS through 1992 and as Chairman of the Board of Directors from 1992 to 2008. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Knowledge Networks, the survey research firm he co-founded in 1997. Nie is a renowned scholar of political science and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and currently a Research Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he also founded the Stanford Institute for Quantitative Study of Society (SIQSS). He is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Award (1976 and 1997) and was recognized with a lifetime achievement award by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) for his contributions to survey analytics, as well as his works in political behavior. With a distinguished career in both business and academia, Nie brings strategic vision, experienced management and proven execution to his role on the Board of Directors and as a Senior Advisor.
Zack Urlocker has worked for 25 years in the software industry and has held executive positions in engineering and marketing at a range of enterprise software companies. Most recently, Urlocker held the title of executive vice president of products at MySQL AB, responsible for engineering and marketing the world's most popular open source database. During his tenure at MySQL, Urlocker developed the business strategy that grew the company’s revenue to $100 million annually. He joined Sun Microsystems after its $1 Billion acquisition of MySQL in 2008. Previously, Urlocker held executive product management and marketing positions at Active Software (later acquired by webMethods) and Borland International, where he helped create and launch the award-winning Delphi and JBuilder lines of client/server development tools. Urlocker is a frequent speaker at business conferences on using open source technology for competitive advantage and is the author of the widely-read Open Force blog.