Project Gratitude #001 – Pierre Haren and ILOG

I know, starting with Pierre was too easy of a bet for all my former ILOG colleagues and those still at IBM. But most will relate to the tremendous impact of the ILOG ride and concur on this obvious pick. Now, if you haven't heard about Pierre Haren , here is a factual and concise bio circa the ILOG era.

With 22 years, ILOG is likely the longest I’ll have ever worked for the same company. I don’t blame IBM for not counting these years as IBM experience, for pension calculation sake or rather lack thereof. Indeed, we certainly had so much fun during these years while IBM went through the most somber of its years in the 90s, there is no fair equivalence. But, for ILOG, not just the longest professional tenure, the most exciting as well: starting a business from scratch, opening international subsidiaries, completing a few successful acquisitions, getting publicly listed on NASDAQ and in Europe, inventing and innovating at the largest scale, with and for prestigious clients around the world, and with measurable impact to make our planet better and smarter.

Not all ILOGers can claim they’ve seen this venture from day 1 to the beginning of the end, that is the (des)integration into IBM. From April 1987 to the first transfer of employees, with the US, in February 2009. I interviewed one month after the company was incorporated and I recall being the 7th on the payroll as a few distinguished pioneers still hadn’t transferred from INRIA yet. So grateful for the chance Pierre gave us to join this life-changing experience. To be honest, I wasn’t even feeling like I had joined a risky start-up. For one thing we were bootstrapped with already very valuable technology and software, coming from several years of advanced yet very applied and pragmatic research work. And, under Pierre’s leadership and dynamism, we plunged right into selling value to create a sustainable profitable business based on transformational client projects right off the bat. Selling during the day and coding at night and on weekends, the beginning of an ultra life and endurance journey, with countless sub 6-hour nights…

Grateful to Pierre for having assembled what we joked about being a zoo: an international diversity not common in France at the time, a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, a diversity of technologies from UI to AI. Yes, the broader AI, before it became only or mostly ML nowadays.

Grateful to Pierre for encouraging and supporting mobility across functions and countries which got so many ILOGers to experience and embrace a variety of cultures.

Grateful to Pierre for accepting differences of opinions. Would French be known for being opiniated and complaining? You bet, we were rich of opinions and expressed feelings in such a multi-cultural environment, something which was both surprising and amusing to some of our American colleagues especially (I didn’t imagine back then that I would become a dual citizen). But an amazingly productive zoo overall which produced technologies still essential today for our clients, high quality software which strived through 4 decades of changes many of our competitors didn’t survive, and through multiple major language waves: from Lisp—and not any Lisp but the super efficient Le Lisp— to C++, Java and C# at some point, or Python integration nowadays for some of our offerings.

Grateful to Pierre to have accelerated our blend into IBM, thriving to make of ILOG the best IBM integration, if not acquisition; and then for sticking around well beyond the traditional C-level retention package, genuinely working at transforming IBM with the deepest technical integrity and most ethical setting of client value expectations. I’m certainly missing seeing this relentless discipline applied consistently across all our business opportunities nowadays.

Last but not least, grateful to Pierre for his friendship. And his relentless inspiration to keep learning and playing with new ideas. Which now includes, for him, the nirvana of predicting the future! Follow Pierre and see the nuggets he shares from his Causality Link news analytics gem.

Merci Pierre!

PS: heads-up, my second pick won’t be as obvious, hedge your bets! ??