Google Cloud Data Analytics VP Jumps To DataRobot

Debanjan Saha has joined the Boston-based company as president and chief operating officer.

DataRobot has landed a key former Google Cloud executive as its new president and chief operating officer.

Debanjan Saha, who had been vice president and general manager of data analytics at Google Cloud for more than 2.5 years, has joined the Boston-based company, which aims to “democratize” data science with end-to-end automation for deploying artificial intelligence (AI) applications within an organization.

Saha will work with CEO Dan Wright to expand the use of the DataRobot’s AI Cloud platform to more customers globally and help scale its product, engineering, technology innovation, security, strategy and marketing functions, according to the company. DataRobot customers include Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Boston Bruins and Red Sox, Carrefour, Crowdstrike, Lenovo, Mars, McLaren Racing, Okta and Riyad Bank.

In a DataRobot blog post, Saha said he first got to know the company in talks with customers while at Google Cloud.

“DataRobot was, by far, the most commonly deployed AI solution,” Saha said. “AI is essential for the most successful organizations across the private and public sector to accelerate growth and become more efficient. Organizations understand that AI is a true competitive advantage, but I’ve seen firsthand the challenges that many face when it comes to getting the results they expect from AI solutions. DataRobot enables entire teams — from data scientists to data engineers and from IT to business users — to collaborate on a unified platform. I believe in DataRobot’s vision of democratizing AI and enabling the entire organization, not just a few, to use the awesome power of data to drive this next wave of transformation.”

A spokesperson for Google Cloud said Saha’s former team is reporting to Gerrit Kazmaier, who was hired from SAP last April as vice president and general manager for database, data analytics and Looker. The spokesperson did not comment on Saha’s replacement.

Saha had been responsible for engineering, operations and go-to-market for Google Cloud Platform’s analytics business. His Google Cloud product/services purview included BigQuery – a fully managed, petabyte-scale, multi-cloud analytics data warehouse – along with Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Dataproc, Cloud Data Fusion, Cloud Composer and Data Catalog.

In an interview with CRN last year, Saha said the technology industry was in generation three of the cloud computing journey – the data cloud era – and that he saw Google Cloud, with its data analytics prowess, as having the best chance to lead it.

“We have been in the business of organizing the world’s information for a very long time,” Saha told CRN at the time. “Data is in our DNA, and that’s what drives Google.”

Saha joined Google Cloud in 2019 from rival Amazon Web Services, where he spent close to five years in roles that included vice president and general manager of Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service. He led the launches of Amazon Aurora – a fully managed relational database engine and one of AWS’ fastest growing services ever – and AWS Glue, a serverless data-preparation service for extract, transform and load operations, according to his LinkedIn page. Saha previously held multiple executive and technical leadership positions in IBM.