data-virtualization
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Ravi Shankar Made a Career of Moving Less Data - and More Minds
He began as a software developer, learned to sell an idea without sanding off its technical edges, and has spent more than a decade making a contrarian case for leaving enterprise data where it lives.
Vinay Samuel
Vinay Samuel is the founder and CEO of Zetaris, a data virtualization and analytical data fabric company he started in a Melbourne garage in 2013 after walking away from a million-dollar executive contract. A first-generation Australian and self-taught programmer since age 14, he spent two decades in senior roles at Teradata, Greenplum, Vertica and Hewlett-Packard before building technology that lets enterprises query data wherever it lives, without first moving it into a data lake. Zetaris has raised roughly $30 million from investors including In-Q-Tel, works with customers such as Telstra, NBN, Optus, Nokia and Melbourne Water, and now positions its platform to prepare data for AI faster and at lower cost.
Angel Vina
Dr. Angel Vina is the Founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, the global leader in data virtualization and data management platforms. A former academic who spent 25 years as a university professor at institutions including the Technical University of Madrid and the University of A Coruña - with postdoctoral research stints at UCLA and Stanford - Vina founded Denodo in Spain in 1999 after asking a deceptively simple question: how can we set data free? Today Denodo operates in 25 offices across 20 countries, has secured $336 million in Series B funding from TPG, and has been named a Gartner Leader in Data Integration Tools for five consecutive years. Vina's academic obsession with real-time distributed data systems became a commercial category - and a company that turned 25 in 2025.