Database Column contributor: Jerry Held

Jerry Held, Ph.D., is currently Chairman of the Board of Vertica Systems and the CEO of the Held Consulting Group which provides strategic consulting to CEOs and senior executives of technology firms ranging from startups to very large organizations as well as major private equity firms. Dr. Held also serves on the boards of Business Objects, Openwave, MetaMatrix, Mirapoint and is chairman of Software Development Technologies. In 1998, Dr. Held was "CEO-in-residence" at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Through 1997, he was senior vice president of Oracle Corporation's server product division, leading a division of 1,500 people and helping the company grow from $1.5 billion to $6 billion annually. Prior to Oracle, he spent 18 years at Tandem Computers, where he was a member of the executive team that grew Tandem from a startup to a $2 billion company. Throughout his tenure at Tandem, Dr. Held was appointed to several senior management positions, including chief technology officer, senior vice president of strategy, and vice president of new ventures.

Dr. Held received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Purdue, an M.S. in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the initial development of the INGRES relational database management system. He also attended the Stanford Business School's Executive Program.

Dr. Held is also a member of the board of directors and Vice Chairman of the Tech Museum of Innovation and a member of the board of Montalvo Arts Center.