FIVE MINUTES WITH ...
ED THOMPSON
Ed Thompson is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Matillion . Alongside his team , he follows developments in future technologies , both identifying opportunities to improve Matillion ’ s current product and identifying the next steps for the company ’ s advancement .
Q . HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE INDUSTRY ?
» I left school not really knowing what I wanted to do . I was lucky enough to get a job in a 30-person consultancy firm working with IBM software , which thrust me into the IT industry .
The thing with consultancy firms is that they ’ re feast or famine – it ’ s either going really well or they end up being overstaffed and need to lay people off . This was a bit of a shock early in my career .
Then , at 18 , I went to study Computer Science at Salford . Once I finished my degree , I went back to IBM consultancy , working there right up until 2011 .
That ’ s when myself and Matthew Scullion set about founding Matillion . Since then , we ’ ve gone from two people in a new office to 700 employees and over a thousand customers across multiple continents .
Like a lot of businesses , we didn ' t necessarily start out doing exactly what we ended up doing . But , we started Matillion fairly early in the growth curve of cloud computing . Amazon Web Services had just become established , with Microsoft and Google scrambling to catch up . It meant there was an opportunity to combine well-established ideas , business intelligence and data integration with lots of emerging cloud technology . We could begin to do things better , faster , more efficiently and target a wider audience than the industry was able to serve . That ' s why we started , initially , doing business intelligence in the cloud and data integration laterally in the cloud .
THE MANTRA ALL SOFTWARE COMPANIES NEED TO LIVE BY IS : ‘ PERFECTION
IS THE ENEMY OF GOOD ENOUGH ’
22 December 2022