Ben Werther is the founder and CEO of Platfora, a company that unlocks data in Hadoop with intuitive visual interaction and analytics. Werther was previously the VP of Products at DataStax, where he led the inception and launch of Brisk (Hadoop powered by Cassandra). Prior to DataStax, he was director of product management at EMC’s Data Computing Products Division (formerly Greenplum). At Greenplum, Werther led product management for the company, and drove product strategy, prioritization and product definition. Prior to Greenplum, Werther was at Microsoft where he was responsible for planning of the ‘post-Longhorn’ Windows Server platform and strategic planning for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform. Werther was a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, and holds an M.S. from Stanford University and a B.Comp. from Monash University.