Bhushan Lakhe is a Big Data professional, technology evangelist, Author and avid blogger residing in the windy city of Chicago. After graduating from one of India’s leading universities (Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani), he started his career with India’s biggest software house, Tata Consultancy Services. Thereafter, he joined ICL, a British computer company and worked with prestigious British clients. Moving to Chicago in 1995, he worked as a consultant with Fortune 50 companies like Leo Burnett, Blue Cross, Motorola, JPMorgan Chase and British Petroleum, often in a critical and pioneering role.

After a seven-year stint executing successful Big Data (as well as Data Warehouse) projects for IBM’s clients (and receiving the company’s prestigious Gerstner Award in 2012), Mr. Lakhe spent two years helping Unisys Corporation’s clients with Big Data implementations and thereafter two years as Senior Vice President (Information and Data Architecture) at Ipsos (world’s 3rd largest Market Research corporation) helping design Global Data Architecture and Big Data strategy.

Currently, Mr. Lakhe heads the Big Data practice for HCL globally. At HCL, Mr. Lakhe is involved in building and managing the Big Data practice and architecting Big Data Platform solutions for Fortune 500 corporations. Mr. Lakhe is active in the Chicago Hadoop community and is co-organizer for a meetup group (http://www.meetup.com/ambariCloud-Big-Data-Meetup/) where he regularly talks about new Hadoop technologies and tools. You can find Mr. Lakhe on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhushanlakhe