PALO ALTO, Calif. — October 13, 2020 — Hybrid cloud data warehouse company Yellowbrick Data today announced that Mark Cusack has joined the company as chief technology officer (CTO), where he will shape the company’s roadmap, guide product development, continue to push the boundaries of what data warehouses and data analytics systems can do, and enhance the company’s ecosystem partnerships.
“It’s the perfect time for Mark to join our leadership team,” said Neil Carson, CEO of Yellowbrick Data. “The data warehouse market has exploded, and Snowflake’s IPO showed how hungry businesses are for even scraps of innovation in analytics. Mark is a brilliant technologist who cares deeply about customers. His addition to our company will serve to dramatically elevate our leadership position as the only data warehouse specifically designed for superior price/performance and hybrid cloud.”
“Yellowbrick has a robust product portfolio, strong differentiation with hybrid cloud expertise and unmatched price/performance, a great team, and large enterprise customers who truly are data-driven—I couldn’t ask for a better place to join as CTO,” said Cusack. “This is a pivotal time in the data warehousing space and in the global economy. Business transformation has taken on an urgency and immediacy that simply didn’t exist a few months ago—and enterprises demand dramatic new approaches to data and analytics. I’m excited to do my part here at Yellowbrick and push the boundaries of our technology and the possibilities of our customers.”
Prior to joining Yellowbrick Data as CTO, Cusack was vice president for data and analytics at Teradata, with lead product management responsibility for the data warehouse and advanced analytics portfolio. Over the past three years he led the effort to augment the Teradata database with machine learning and graph analytics capabilities, culminating in the release of Vantage, the most widely adopted Teradata version to date.
During his six-year tenure at Teradata, Cusack also led the product management function responsible for the data warehouse ecosystem of products, supporting data loading, data virtualization, near real-time streaming, monitoring and management, and application development.
He was chief architect of Teradata’s IoT analytics effort, applying novel machine learning approaches to automate the management of workloads and the detection of anomalies, based on real-time analysis of telemetry data.
Cusack joined Teradata in 2014 when the company acquired the startup RainStor. He was a cofounding developer at RainStor, and as chief architect led the team responsible for developing the parallel SQL query engine that powered RainStor’s structured data warehouse archiving product. RainStor provided an on-line queriable archiving capability based on a patented data deduplication technology that delivered industry-leading 40x compression rates.
Prior to RainStor, Cusack was a lead scientist in the UK Ministry of Defence, developing parallel and distributed simulation frameworks to support training and operations.
Cusack holds a PhD in computational physics from Newcastle University, UK, with a thesis centered on discovering the electronic and nonlinear optical properties of quantum dots. As a research fellow at Newcastle, he developed new techniques for modeling these novel quantum structures by using large-scale parallel and distributed computing approaches.
