Brad Hopper
VP of Vertical Markets at Cloud Software Group
Brad Hopper, VP of Vertical Markets at Cloud Software Group, has spent his career at the forefront of data analytics in manufacturing and energy. With a background in engineering and a passion for problem-solving, he has helped shape Spotfire's visual analytics technology into a powerful tool for industries ranging from semiconductors to oil and gas.
Brad has a background in manufacturing, including degrees from UC Berkeley, and worked at AMD as a process and yield engineer. Both gave him unique insights into the potential applications of Spotfire's technology.
His journey with Spotfire began in the early days of the company.
"I joined just a few years after the company started. I was employee number 65," he recalls. "The moment I saw Spotfire, I said, ‘this is something that really needs to be in the semiconductor business’," Brad explains.
"Those industries are very underserved from a data analytics perspective. They have these super-advanced, super high-powered and very complex vertical applications. Each of those industries has different ones, and they buy them for four, five million for the plant."
The problem, Brad explains, was that only a handful of people would become experts in these complex systems, creating bottlenecks in data analysis.
He says Spotfire offered a solution: "We can deliver an interactive analysis environment that is not afraid of highly-technical, deeply domain-specific data, and we can apply high powered analytical methods, but the focus is on ease of use."