First, congratulations on your selection as a 2025 BigDATAwire Person to Watch! You have had an amazing career so far, with stops at Intuit, IBM, MarkLogic, Couchbase, Alluxio, and Ahana before joining Microsoft in 2022. How did all those big data experiences prepare you for your current role at Microsoft?

I am grateful for this recognition. There are so many movers and shakers in this space, and it’s an honor to be included in this list. While I’ve had a range of experiences prior to Microsoft from Fortune 100 companies to fast growing startups to even founding my own, they all centered around Data and platform companies. Data continues to be the foundation for enterprises and even more so now with genAI. I believe depth in your space is really important to make informed decisions, building credibility especially with customers and driving breakthrough innovation. While I have been very successful with startups, with an IPO and a strategic exit, I learned a key leadership trait from every experience – adapting to change. This has never been more relevant as AI is transforming our world. Microsoft is leading that transformation for our customers and it’s amazing to be able to play a part in this once-in-a-decade opportunity.

Microsoft has a huge variety of offerings across big data, analytics, and AI. What is the company’s biggest advantage when it comes to winning business in big data, analytics, and AI?

Microsoft has a range of offerings in data, analytics and AI. Microsoft’s biggest advantage lies in its comprehensive and fully integrated vision for an end-to-end AI stack, spanning from cloud infrastructure to data to AI-driven applications with security and governance at every layer. Copilots are deeply embedded into every offering. At the data layer, Microsoft Fabric not only provides a seamless SaaS unified data platform for analytics, including real-time analytics, but also operational use cases with the state of art SQL database offered as a workload in Fabric. This comprehensive approach allows our customers to spend less time integrating a range of services and products and more time getting real value from their data and enabling AI efficiencies.

Microsoft has great partnerships and also great developers. When launching a new Azure Cloud offering, how do you decide when you should build internally versus when you should partner with an existing vendor?

Great question. This decision is one every product leader makes as they envision executing on their roadmap. Microsoft embraces our partners. A stronger ecosystem around Microsoft means better experiences for our customers. The answer depends on several key parameters that include time to market, if the component is a core foundation or a niche use case, and if there open-source projects that have addressed a similar problem. Microsoft Fabric has embraced open source. We support DeltaLake and Apache Iceberg table formats for Microsoft OneLake – where data across the customer’s data estate is managed. But we went a step further and opened the Microsoft Fabric platform – the same platform that our analytics, data factory and Power BI workloads are built on – so partners and software companies can bring their capabilities natively into it, giving our customers the benefit of a thriving ecosystem.
 

Data lakehouses are growing thanks to the standardization on the Apache Iceberg format. What is Microsoft’s strategy for supporting Iceberg with OneLake?

With Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft moved from closed proprietary formats to open source table formats so that no data is locked in. But as a cloud leader, we have customers across both table formats – DeltaLake and Apache Iceberg. While we started off with the DeltaLake format, we now support Apache Iceberg as well. We believe this is really important because it meets our customers where they are and allows complete interoperability across data platforms. Microsoft OneLake, often referred to as the “OneDrive for data,” provides a single unified multi-cloud, SaaS data lake for organizations. It supports multiple engines, allowing for various kinds of compute on a single data lake layer.
 

What can you tell us about yourself outside of the professional sphere – unique hobbies, favorite places, etc.? Is there anything about you that your colleagues might be surprised to learn?

Outside of work, I try to maximize spending time with my family – husband and two kids (11 and 9). We love traveling the world together – we have one last wonder of the world left to visit. Travel and music are two things that really keep me going. While there isn’t enough time for unique hobbies, I did teach myself to play the ukulele and enjoy strumming and singing with the kids. I love all genres of music and perhaps my favorite may surprise my colleagues – Reggaeton 😊