Top AI Execs to Watch

Shaun Bierweiler, Hortonworks

Shaun Bierweiler is president of Hortonworks Federal and vice president of U.S. public sector. Bierweiler’s 16-year public sector career includes experience at Red Hat and Raytheon as well as a software engineer internship for an Air Force project. He is a member of the AFCEA International Technology Committee.

Why Watch: As head of a unit within a company named to the fastest-growing tech stocks of 2017, Bierweiler is primed to play an increasing role in harnessing the power of big data in ways that make an impact.

“I’m most proud of the numerous instances where our team and technology has enabled and empowered customers across the public sector to accomplish the tasks that were previously impossible,” Bierweiler said. “Whether it be predictive maintenance for a Department of Defense customer, a real-time toll and traffic analytics platform for state and local customers, a comprehensive data platform for the upcoming decennial 2020 Census, or the modernization of a federal enterprise data warehouse — the use cases and value propositions have been so interesting, exciting, vast and rewarding.”

Bierweiler sees big data as “the ability to empower and unlock the potential of your data across your various data sets,” and he’s in a prime position to help unlock that potential.

“When we are talking with customers about their data challenges, it often involves a scenario where their data sets have become so large, complex and/or fast that their traditional tools, systems and data processing approaches are no longer adequate — and customers are left with either no insight or extremely long processing times,” he said.

Hortonworks, he said, provides government customers with “a truly comprehensive enterprise data platform” at a time when the amount of data is larger than ever and stored in a variety of locations.

“Hortonworks is uniquely positioned to provide government customers with a truly comprehensive enterprise data platform — built for massive scale with world-class support, encompassing both data-at-rest through Hortonworks Data Platform (our enterprise Hadoop offering) and data-in-motion through Hortonworks DataFlow (the industry’s only enterprise NiFi offering), and spanning on-prem, in the cloud, and hybrid multicloud environments,” Bierweiler said. “And we are doing so while staying true to our commitment to the open source development model — which ensures that the government can maintain innovation, interoperability and integration of future data sets and technologies. There is no other company out there that can say this.”