Michael Donahue, MBA

Chicago2.6k followers

Pentaho

ex-Hitachi Vantaraex-Hitachi Data Systems

I'm a new-ventures builder and general manager who also happens to be a Field CTO — a polished way of saying that when an enterprise data or AI platform is brilliant but commercially confused, I'm the person they send in.
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I get handed the business units nobody wants to mention at the holiday party and turn them into the ones the company puts on its marketing page. Case in point: I took over a video-intelligence business everyone wanted to liquidate, repackaged its castoffs into a remote substation-monitoring solution, and turned it into a branded product sold company-wide — and suddenly everyone wanted That's the pattern. CEO-appointed to write the business cases behind multimillion-dollar investment and new business lines, I've grown a barely-there product into an eight-figure business in about two Two decades inside one global technology enterprise taught me to move fast in an organization built for consensus, regulation, and matrixed approval, without letting it slow me My style is less "slash-and-burn," more "find the value everyone else walked past" — cut the waste nobody else spots without gutting the people or product that make it work. I've owned P&Ls, led global teams, and built practices from a blank I focus on trusted data foundations for AI: sovereign AI, data governance, lineage, and the "golden lakehouse" architectures regulated enterprises need before trusting AI in production — untangling siloed data so AI runs faster and cheaper. I advise C-suite and senior government leaders — US Federal Civilian, Defense, and Intelligence agencies across Five Eyes and European markets — plus financial services, energy, and healthcare, with deep capital-markets roots from surveillance to What I'm actually good at:- New ventures & M&A — zero-to-one builds, carve-outs, divestitures, transaction monetization- Turnarounds & GM — full P&L, hidden-value spotting, cutting waste others miss- Business development & go-to-market — value-based selling, GSI and hyperscaler alliances, new-market entry- Data & AI strategy — siloed-data cleanup so AI costs less; governance, integration, sovereign AI, MLOps- Field CTO leadership — turning "the platform can do that" into pipeline and customer valueOpen to new-venture, business-development, VP/GM, and Field CTO roles — Chicago, hybrid, or remote. If you're building trusted data for AI, or have a software business one strategy from great (bonus points if it needs a turnaround), let's talk. I like underdogs and have a high tolerance for chaos.

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PENTAHOJOB
1. Head of BD & Global Field…
  1M
HITACHI VANTARAJOB
1. Head of BD & Global Field…
  2Y 3M
2. Senior Dir, BD & Growth
  2Y 1M
3. General Mgr & Global Pract…
  1Y 4M
4. Dir, New Ventures & Platfo…
  3Y 2M
5. Master Solution Eng & Pres…
  4Y 8M
HITACHI DATA SYSTEMSJOB
1. Dir, New-Business Incubati…
  4Y 4M
2. Product Mgr, Healthcare Data
  2Y
FRANCORP,JOB
1. IT Mgr
  1Y
ENTERPRISE RENT-A-CARJOB
1. Storage Eng
  4Y 2M
DELOITTEJOB
1. Lead Systems Administrator
  1Y 7M
HOUGHTON MIFFLINJOB
1. Technical Analyst
  1Y 4M

Job: Pentaho — Head of Business Development & Global Field CTO — new ventures, growth & P&L · 2026-06 – 2026-07 · 1 mo — Carried the business through its carve-out from the parent company and acquisition by a publicly traded software acquirer — protecting client and revenue continuity through the transition, then moving on to my next growth and new-ventures mandate. - Partnered with the corporate M&A team to position the business as a key asset in the transaction and execute a clean transfer to the acquirer. - Closed out enterprise relationships and pipeline with no customer or revenue disruption. Now fully focused on my next executive mandate: building and commercializing new businesses inside a growth-minded organization.
Job: Hitachi Vantara — Head of Business Development & Global Field CTO — new-venture growth, GTM & P&L · 2024-03 – 2026-06 · 2y 3mo — Growth and business-development leader for an enterprise data & AI platform — turned platform capability into pipeline, new business, and revenue across regulated industries by aligning product, field, and customers on one go-to-market strategy. Scope: business development, new-market entry, and enterprise go-to-market (GTM) across financial services, insurance, energy & utilities, manufacturing, healthcare, and government — US Federal Civilian, Defense, and Intelligence agencies across Five Eyes and European markets. - Repositioned a data-integration platform from a tool into critical infrastructure for regulated enterprises and led the go-to-market campaign behind it — growing qualified…
Job: Hitachi Vantara — Senior Director, Business Development & Growth — recurring-revenue GTM, alliances & P&L · 2022-02 – 2024-03 · 2y 1mo — Senior Director of global business development and revenue growth for a hybrid-cloud / everything-as-a-service (XaaS) portfolio — led the shift from CAPEX product sales to subscription (SaaS), managed services, and recurring revenue (ARR) across North America. - Built and scaled a multi-year enterprise sales pipeline; re-engineered the North American GTM engine on value-based selling, account-based selling (ABS), and MEDDIC / MEDDPICC. - Restructured the global sales organization and incentive-comp model toward recurring revenue (ARR) and consumption-based metrics; instilled forecasting discipline and pipeline hygiene in the CRM. - Formed strategic alliances with hyperscalers and leading c…
Job: Hitachi Vantara — General Manager & Global Practice Leader — business-unit turnaround, new ventures & P&L · 2020-11 – 2022-03 · 1y 4mo — CEO-appointed General Manager with full P&L for a distressed global business unit (computer vision, edge AI, IoT, and video-intelligence / smart-spaces platforms) — led its turnaround and pivot to a high-margin solutions-and-services business. - Restored profitability and growth by pivoting from a commoditized systems integrator to a high-margin, as-a-service (XaaS) model; rationalized a broad portfolio into vertically targeted solutions and grew services attachment. - Created an autonomous-retail (self-checkout) platform — a zero-to-one new venture built inside the unit. - Launched a flagship intelligent-infrastructure brand and co-developed a remote substation-monitoring solution for gri…
Job: Hitachi Vantara — Director, New Ventures & Platform Partnerships — zero-to-one incubation, product & GTM · 2017-09 – 2020-11 · 3y 2mo — Led product, technology-platform partnerships, and new-practice incubation for a smart-spaces and video-insights portfolio — owning the roadmap, alliances, and go-to-market from concept to commercialization. - Secured executive funding to incubate a cross-functional innovation team and commercialize zero-to-one offerings; landed marquee lighthouse accounts. - Grew cross-company product attach by integrating IP across multiple sister companies; hit cross-company sales targets. - Revitalized and divested a medical-domain product (acquired by a global health-technology company), managing the full lifecycle to exit. - Led post-merger integration (PMI) and M&A commercialization; contributed to…
Job: Hitachi Data Systems — Director, New-Business Incubation & Strategy — zero-to-one data platform, M&A & P&L · 2013-05 – 2017-09 · 4y 4mo — Founded and scaled a new industry-technology practice from ideation to global operational scale within the company's innovation group — the incubation engine behind several new business lines. - Secured a Global Executive Board mandate and authored the CEO-approved business cases that unlocked multi-million-dollar funding across several new business lines — an incubation P&L I ran and grew to deliver strong net-new enterprise logo growth. - Commercialized a zero-to-one enterprise data platform from concept to market. - Led M&A integration of acquired companies, compressing timelines and accelerating time-to-revenue. - Introduced subscription and SaaS licensing; set go-to-market using estab…
Job: Hitachi Data Systems — Product Manager, Healthcare Data — clinical-data business turnaround (zero-to-one revival) · 2011-05 – 2013-05 · 2y — Owned the healthcare clinical-data platform — intercepted an end-of-life clinical repository, found the latent market demand, and rebuilt it into a new business, launched at a major industry conference. - Grew the revived product's revenue by roughly an order of magnitude, inside a diagnostic-imaging and health-IT portfolio later acquired by a larger company. - Normalized disparate clinical data and imaging (EHR / HL7) into unified electronic records across multi-facility health systems. - Expanded product margins by modernizing underused R&D assets (enterprise replication, secure file transfer, application integration). - Managed senior engagements, co-innovation programs, and multi-facil…
Job: Hitachi Vantara — Master Solution Engineer & Presales Consultant — enterprise data, DR & value engineering · 2006-09 – 2011-05 · 4y 8mo — Presales and solutions consultant who positioned enterprise data and storage solutions during customer onboarding and competitive pursuits — the field-facing engine behind new-logo wins. - Provided consultative architecture design that positioned automated enterprise data solutions to solve complex content and process bottlenecks and win deals. - Engineered secure enterprise storage and data-processing systems; designed and validated enterprise-wide disaster-recovery protocols for mission-critical, highly regulated environments.
Job: Francorp, Inc — IT Manager — infrastructure consolidation & vendor cost reduction · 2005-03 – 2006-03 · 1y — Managed IT operations and infrastructure for a franchise-development consultancy. - Led an internal technology overhaul, deploying networking and communications that connected every company office. - Renegotiated technology-vendor contracts to reduce cost; mentored and promoted a successor.
Job: Enterprise Rent-A-Car — Storage Engineer — global SAN, data warehouse & international expansion delivery · 2001-01 – 2005-03 · 4y 2mo — Modernized global technical infrastructure during a major corporate expansion — from legacy midrange to high-performance distributed architectures. - Technical architect for a new European data center during the Euro currency conversion; engineered cross-border transaction routing and verified multi-jurisdictional data-residency compliance. - Stood up the corporate enterprise data warehouse, centralizing large-scale fleet and customer data to power predictive fleet-yield analytics. - Led migration of the branch network off high-latency satellite to business broadband and centralized thin-client computing, collapsing transaction latency dramatically. - Decommissioned proprietary legacy midr…
Job: Deloitte — Lead Systems Administrator — network & business-intelligence infrastructure · 1999-06 – 2001-01 · 1y 7mo — (Deloitte acquired Klayman & Korman during my tenure) Systems and network administration for a leading global professional-services firm. - Managed complex network environments, servers, and business-intelligence infrastructure. - Ensured day-to-day operational reliability for internal teams.
Job: Houghton Mifflin — Technical Analyst — systems support & enterprise-publishing infrastructure · 1998-02 – 1999-06 · 1y 4mo — Technical analysis and systems support for a major publishing enterprise. - Supported infrastructure, applications, and end-user technology across the organization.
School: University of Notre Dame - Mendoza College of Business — Master of Business Administration - MBA, Business Administration and Management, General
School: University of Notre Dame - Mendoza College of Business — Executive Integral Leadership
School: Columbia College Chicago — Bachelor of Arts - BA
School: Columbia College Chicago — Bachelor of Arts, Cinematography and Film/Video Production

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MakeNew Business DevelopmentGeneral ManagementP&L ManagementCorporate DevelopmentProduct DevelopmentCommercializationEnterprise SoftwareData StrategiesStrategic PartnershipsMarket EntryMatrix ManagementStrategic AlliancesSales OperationsTurn Around ManagementBusiness DevelopmentMergers & Acquisitions (M&A)Revenue & Profit GrowthGenerative AI (GenAI)Value-Based Selling (MEDDIC / MEDDPICC)Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy

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Michael Donahue, MBA

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