CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 17, 2025--
Ocient, the leading data analytics software solutions company, today announced the appointment of seasoned technology leader and proven growth executive John Morris as chief executive officer and board director. In his new role, Morris will manage day-to-day business operations and scaling growth. Ocient co-founder Chris Gladwin will retain his role as Founder and Executive Chairman, where he will continue to support product strategy, customer success, and solutions built for efficient, large-scale analytics.
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In addition to the new leadership appointment, Ocient punctuated its accelerated growth by achieving closed bookings within the first five months of the fiscal year that are nearly triple last year's annual total. This growth, driven by expanding work with global Telcos, large-scale enterprises in commercial data and analytics, and AdTech companies like new customer Roqad — which will leverage Ocient solutions for Predictive AI insights — highlights the urgent need for analytics solutions that deliver exceptional performance, lower total cost of ownership, and optimized resource and operational efficiency.
Morris is a seasoned technology leader with decades of experience driving growth-stage companies to scale. Known for his ability to execute, he joined Gladwin’s previous venture Cleversafe as CEO to help build it into a game-changing force in data storage, leading to its $1.4B acquisition by IBM in 2015. John has also held notable executive roles at IBM and Juniper Networks, where he established his expertise for leading high-growth teams and accelerating market penetration. Ahead of his appointment as Ocient CEO, he joined the company as a board observer in 2024.
“I could not be more thrilled to welcome John as he takes the helm as CEO. His operational and strategic leadership come at a pivotal time for Ocient, much like when he joined Cleversafe and helped drive tripled revenues, which resulted in the company’s $1.4B acquisition and 10x returns for investors,” said Chris Gladwin, Founder and Executive Chairman of Ocient. “Our recent customer wins, milestone bookings attainment, and John’s proven leadership are proof of Ocient's commitment to meeting the escalating demands for truly transformative large-scale data analytics.”
“Ocient's solutions-based approach to solving customers’ large-scale data challenges is a true differentiator in a crowded market,” said John Morris, CEO of Ocient. “I'm thrilled to join this expert team at a time when we are seeing tremendous customer validation that underscores the immediate impact of our solutions and drives forward our mission to transform data challenges into strategic advantages for enterprises around the globe."
Jim Dugan, founding managing partner of OCA Ventures noted, “As an early investor in both Ocient and Cleversafe, we've experienced firsthand how the tremendous leadership of John Morris and Chris Gladwin drives impactful innovation in the most demanding data use cases with some of the world’s most discerning technology clients. OCA Ventures is thrilled to support this highly successful team once again as Ocient revolutionizes the possibilities in data analytics.”
“Revolutionizing digital advertising with data from consented anonymized users requires solutions that cut through complexity and deliver real insights and performance,” said Carsten Frien, co-founder and CEO of Roqad. "We're excited to partner with Ocient and – with their streamlined data processing and Predictive AI capabilities – continue delivering superior, actionable identity solutions to our customers."
Ocient transforms the most complex, compute-intensive analytics challenges into advantages for leading enterprises across industries. With innovative capabilities including for Predictive AI/ML and strategic partnerships with industry experts from AMD, Solidigm, and Vertosoft, Ocient solutions-based approach delivers unparalleled performance and efficiency to organizations creating and competing with data.
About Ocient
Ocient is a data analytics software solutions company that enables always-on, compute-intensive analysis of complex, large-scale data with outstanding performance that delivers up to 90% price savings. Ocient brings data transformation, loading, complex query processing, AI, OcientML® and OcientGeo® a single, consolidated solution for deeper insights and data-driven decision making. Enterprises can deploy Ocient’s pilot-to-production solutions on premises, in the OcientCloud® or in the public cloud, with little to no resource-intensive integration. Ocient is a global, carbon-neutral company, headquartered in Chicago, and backed by leading investors including Greycroft, OCA Ventures, In-Q-Tel and Buoyant Ventures. For more information, please visit www.ocient.com.
About Roqad
As Europe’s largest trusted Identity aggregator and data onboarding partner, Roqad takes an agnostic and privacy-first approach to the multi-ID world, offering flexibility, breadth and depth of online and offline IDs in a complex and evolving ecosystem. Our Identity solutions are used by adtech players including Epsilon, Publicis, Samsung Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Nielsen, Dun and Bradstreet, Zeta Global, Zeotap, Verve, Azerion and others to enrich and expand their first party data sets enabling efficient cross-device targeting and attribution.
John Morris, CEO of Ocient
