A Conversation with Hugh Williams

Friday, May 9, 2014 - 2:30 pm

Hugh Williams from Pivotal speaks with Michael Chui from McKinsey about innovation and his career in academia, consumer Internet, search, and big data.

A Conversation with Hugh Williams (DataEDGE 2014)

Pivotal Software Inc.

Hugh E. Williams is the senior vice president of research and design at Pivotal Software Inc. He has spent twenty years researching and developing search engines, web services, and big data technologies.

From 2009 to 2013, Hugh was with eBay. He led a large cross-disciplinary team that turned-around the Marketplaces business. His teams conceived, designed, and built eBay’s user experiences, search engine, big data technologies, and platforms.

Prior to eBay, he spent 4+ years managing a search engine R&D team at Microsoft’s Bing, 10+ years researching and developing search technologies, and 5 years running his own startup and consultancy.

He has published over 100 works, mostly in the field of information retrieval, including two books, Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL and Learning Mysql, for O’Reilly Media, Inc. He holds nineteen US patents and has many more pending. He has a Ph.D. from RMIT University in Australia.

Senior Fellow
McKinsey Global Institute

Michael Chui is a senior fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), where he leads research on the impact of information technologies on business, the economy, and society. Chui has led McKinsey research in such areas as long-term technology-enabled business trends, Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies, emerging markets innovators, and data-driven management. His research has been cited globally in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes, The Times of London, and Les Échos.

As a McKinsey consultant, Chui served clients in the high-tech, media, and telecom industries on strategy, innovation and product development, IT, sales and marketing, M&A, and organization.