Bill Baker has been kicking around the BI industry longer than the term “Business Intelligence”. He graduated from M.I.T. in 1979 and immediately went to work at a small Cambridge, MA software company, Dynamics Associates, which built and sold time-series analytics software and services. Bill then spent eight-plus years at Softbridge Microsystems, also in Cambridge, MA, where he helped develop an early PC-based application ‘factory’ for building business content-rich applications. In the early 90’s he was Sr. VP of Product Development at IRI Software where he led the development of the Express multi-dimensional database including its first Windows-based user interface and porting to a wide variety of server platforms. In 1995 Oracle purchased IRI Software.
Beginning in 1996, Bill spent twelve-plus years at Microsoft where he started the BI team within the SQL Server product unit. Bill and his team delivered three releases of Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Integration Services and the SQL Server Management Studio. During that period, Bill was a frequent spokesperson for BI at Microsoft. During his tenure at Microsoft, Bill was named a Distinguished Engineer.
More recently he was CTO at Visible Technologies, a Bellevue, WA company that produces software to measure and analyze brand perceptions and performance in social media.
Currently Bill is serving on several corporate boards, a few advisory boards and assisting several local software startups in the Seattle area.
You can reach Bill at billbak {at} billbak {dot} com or @billbak on Twitter.