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rtdi.io

Werner Daehn

After working for years in different companies, large and startups, in various roles spanning from consulting – manager – development – product management – chief architect, I felt it was about time to get free from the restraints and start my own company.

The business focus lays on two parts:

  1. Consulting in the area of Data Integration, Analytics, Data Warehouse and Big Data
  2. Providing an Open Source product for realtime data integration.

Curriculum Vitae

2019-(today) Managing Director rtdi.io GmbH

Founded the rtdi.io GmbH in Salzburg, Austria and provide software products for the Big Data world, primarily around Apache Kafka.

I am also working as consultant for various top software vendors and exciting large SAP users. All under NDAs, hence customer names cannot be made public.

2016-2019 SAP SE, Chief Architect for SAP Health

The task was to design a product, based on the HL7 FHIR standard, targeting the Value Based Care product segment. Hence Big Data, Data Integration, Data Modeling, Analytics were the primary drivers.
Products used did span SAP Hana, SAP Analytics Cloud, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS.

2013-2016 SAP SE, Architect for SAP Hana Smart Data Integration

Even today you still have to decide which tool to use: ETL for batch transformations, realtime replication for 1:1 copies with low latency and federated queries for live access.
The customer on the other hand requires all: All transformations ETL tools are known for, either in batch or in realtime data movements or while accessing the data in the source system directly. The whole spectrum.
With these thoughts in mind I invented the Hana Smart Data Integration product and got tasked with leading the implementation as Architect for this solution.

2008-2013 SAP SE, Product Manager for SAP Data Services

Data Services was and still is one of the few ETL tools in the Leader Section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration. As one of the key people knee deep in the internals of Data Services plus the market experience with years of consulting, I was able to perceive the future customer requirements and convert those into easy to develop features solving the specific requirement and supports more use cases as well.

2003-2008 Business Objects SE, Chief Product Expert

With performance being the key point for customers, we changed the monitoring to make it more obvious where the performance problem actually is – usually waiting for the source database or when writing into the target – and helped critical customers to solve their problems.
Later I got special assignments, e.g. to evaluate various EII tools, which turned into the acquisition of Medience. Another issue was with the Rapid Mart product line, where I helped to renovate the product and boosted sales afterwards.

2002-2003 Business Objects SE, Development

In order to get experience with professional software development, the director of development asked me to join his organisation. The stint started with suggesting a feature called Auto Documentation and then I implement it as part of the product. Covering the feature scoping, architecture sign off, documentation, installation, knowledge transfer to the service organization etc.

1999-2002 Acta Technologies, Consulting Lead Central Europe

With my experience in ETL the then startup company Acta Technologies contacted me to build the consulting organization for Central Europe. Initially being skeptic I met with the founder and liked the concept. An ETL tool that helps with the common cases and does not restrict the user.
In the first half year I spent a lot of time in Palo Alto, US with development to learn as much as possible and then worked as the sole consultant at start. Shortly after we increased the the consulting team and my role change to organizing and hiring team members. At the same time I worked closely with the founder of Acta to make the tool even better.
The sales focus for Acta was SAP ERP Data Warehouses with and without SAP BW.

1996-1999 Siemens Business Services, Data Warehouse Consultant

Using my previously acquired knowledge I joined a consulting team focusing on Oracle. Quickly most projects were centered around the topic of Data Warehousing, ranging from project management, database configuration and optimization, ETL and Business Intelligence tools like Business Objects and Cognos.

1992-1996 A. Gerngross Kaufhaus AG, Rebuild the core IT

The retail company had the problem that all their IT processes were two to three generations out of date. All based on Mainframes, batch processing, lots of manual tasks. A project to optimize the organisation by using Client Server architecture, Oracle as backend and terminals in all areas was started. My job was the entire infrastructure, network, database, operations.

1990-1992 Study of Computer Simulation, Technical University Vienna

Paired with mathematics and information technology, the department of Computer Simulation covered both areas. Working with Unix workstations, networks, databases it was a perfect extension to my engineering background.

1985-1990 Institute for Aeronautics (HTBLA)

Final exam (“Abitur”) in basic engineering, electronics, jet engines and the such.

Noteworthy publications

SAP SCN

Other activities

Alpine Snowboarding

Similar to modern carving skis there are snowboards made for carving. And this is how it looks…

Microelectronics

Just to stay current on these things I program mostly STM32 MCUs. See the CableCam controller as an example.

3D Design

Using CAD/CAM different things get manufactured, most notably the CableCam project. Preferred CAD tool is Rhino 3D.