Emma McGrattan -
Speaking Topic: WIOS: From the Keyboard to the Board Room and Back Again

Miss McGrattan is responsible for the development and integration of the Ingres database and associated products and technologies. A leading authority in DBMS technologies, she was instrumental in the ongoing success of the Ingres product line. Miss McGrattan joined Ingres as senior vice president of Engineering from CA where she held a similar position responsible for the Ingres family of relational database management products. Miss McGrattan started her career with Ingres in 1992, and has held a variety of senior development and management positions. Born in Ireland, Miss McGrattan earned a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Dublin City University.

Abstract

Have you ever heard the story of the female construction worker whose tools were continually stolen by her male coworkers? She put an end to it when she painted them hot pink. Her tools never went missing again. Emma started with the Ingres project as a porting engineer, taking the source code originally developed for UNIX and caressing, cajoling and coercing it to work on the OS/2 platform. Following Computer Associates’ disastrous acquisition of the Ingres product, Emma was the lone survivor of the Ingres Desktop Center of Excellence, and her eighteen months experience with Ingres made her an Ingres veteran at the new company, CA. They say it’s lonely at the top, but it’s also very lonely at the bottom, no team, the sole face for a misunderstood product. Emma had to learn fast and figure out how to rise to the top of one of the largest software companies in the world. She believed in her project, and she wanted the world to know about it. Not to mention, she needed people to talk to and have cocktails with after work. Like many women working to move up the career ladder, Emma thirsted to influence her company's direction, contribute to the corporate discussion about customers and products, participate in senior level meetings, and have executives and managers across a global conglomerate seek her opinion. 13 years later, having attained the role of “Senior Vice President, Ingres Engineering,” Emma realized that she was happiest when writing code and evangelizing open source software. In this session you will hear amusing and insightful anecdotes into how one woman rose through the ranks in a software behemoth, and the lessons learned when she chose to dive into the depths of an open source project and make her mark by writing new rules and staying true to herself.