10/25/18 | 4:15pm | E51-335
Reception to follow.

Rama Ramakrishnan

Entrepreneur
Salesforce 

Abstract: Rama will share his experiences building analytic applications over the past 15 years. These applications were at the core of two successful technology startups focused on retail and e-commerce and are now part of the product portfolios of software titans Oracle and Salesforce, where they influence the shopping behavior of hundreds of millions of consumers monthly. He will describe what it takes to build enterprise-class OR/data-science applications and distill the lessons learned, highlighting the ingredients needed to be a successful “analytics entrepreneur” and achieve business impact.

Bio: Rama is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive in the analytics/data science space.

His most recent startup, CQuotient, built a machine-learning-based personalization platform for retail and e-commerce. Rama founded CQuotient in 2010 with backing from Bain Capital Ventures and led the company to a successful exit to Demandware in 2014. As a member of the Demandware executive team, Rama was involved in the successful sale of Demandware to Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) in July 2016 for $2.8 billion. Prior to CQuotient, Rama taught data science at MIT, was Chief Scientist at price-optimization pioneer ProfitLogic, was VP of R&D for the retail business of Oracle, founded two analytics companies, and consulted at McKinsey.

Rama has an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from MIT.