Sohaib Abbasi (born August 14, 1956) is a Pakistani–American

business executive A business executive is a person responsible for running an organization, although the exact nature of the role varies depending on the organization. Executives run companies or government agencies. They create plans to help their organizations gr ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and

philanthropist Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives for the public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private good, focusing on material ...

. He is the former chairman and chief executive of

Informatica Informatica Inc. is an American software development company founded in 1993. It is headquartered in Redwood City, California. Its core products include enterprise cloud data management and data integration. It was co-founded by Gaurav Dhillon a ...

, having served in the roles from 2004 until 2015. He was also a member of the executive committee of

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

and led Oracle Tools and Oracle Education as senior vice president. He retired from these roles in 2003 after 20 years with the company. Abbasi joined the board of directors for the software company, Red Hat Inc. in 2011. In May 2016, Abbasi joined the board of directors for the

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

-based analytics company,

New Relic New Relic, Inc. is an American web tracking and analytics company based in San Francisco. The company's cloud-based software allows websites and mobile apps to track user interactions and service operators' software and hardware performance. In ...

. And in August 2017, Abbasi joined the board of directors for

-based StreamSets, Inc., a DataOps company.

Early life and education

Abbasi was born in

Lahore Lahore ( ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the Administrative units of Pakistan, Pakistani province of Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab. It is the List of cities in Pakistan by population, second-largest city in Pakistan, after Karachi, and ...

Pakistan Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...

in 1956 and moved to various cities with his father, an air force official, before reaching the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

in 1974 to attend college at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

. Abbasi graduated with honors and obtained a bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 1978. He later earned his master's degree in the same field in 1980.

Career

Early career

Abbasi began his professional career as a product manager for Professional Computer Resources in 1980. He developed financial modeling software and ERP applications there before launching his own company, Outlook Software, Inc.

Oracle

Abbasi joined Oracle while the company was a

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...

in 1982, as the manager of Midwestern Sales. He became manager of user interface development in 1984 where he was director of Oracle's first application programming tool, SQL*Forms. The software was first introduced in 1985 and was used by over 90 percent of all Oracle DBMS shops by 1990. Abbasi managed the software tools division at Oracle, which includes application development tools, business intelligence tools, e-business portal tools and pharmaceutical and Internet learning applications. By 1989, he was named the vice-president of Tools and Multi-media for the company. Abbasi was promoted further in 1994 to senior vice-president of Tools Product Division. From 2001 until his retirement from the company in 2003, Abbasi held the role of senior vice president in both the Tools and Education divisions. He retired from Oracle in 2003 after 20 years.

Informatica

In 2004, Abbasi joined the software company,

, as chief executive officer. Before Abbasi joined the company it had reported negative product license growth in 10 of the prior 12 quarters. Under his leadership, Informatica streamlined its operations by cutting its analytic application software development and focusing on the

data warehousing In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for Business intelligence, reporting and data analysis and is a core component of business intelligence. Data warehouses are central Re ...

component of its business. The decision was controversial at the time with resistance among employees and on the board, but Abbasi refocused the company on a narrower set of products. Abbasi led the company through the recession, with the company's growth allowing hiring and expansion to continue through the recession. In 2010, Informatica reached a revenue of $650 million. In 2014, after ten years of Abbasi's leadership, Informatica reached $1 billion in sales. In April 2015, Informatica announced that shareholders had approved the acquisition by Permira funds and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for $5.3 billion or roughly $48 a share. After the deal was completed, Abbasi stepped down as CEO and remained with the company as chairman.

Philanthropy

In 2003, Abbasi and his wife, Sara, created a $2.5 million endowment for a program in Islamic studies at Stanford University. The program included graduate fellowships, research, a new library, language courses, and lectures. At the same time, Stanford alumna Lysbeth Warren made a gift of US$2 million for a new professorship on Islam. Stanford matched both gifts with a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, bringing the total endowment for the program and professorship to US$9 million. The Abbasis established the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They also founded the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Computer Science Fellowship to allow students, preferably from Pakistan, to attend the institution. Abbasi also played a key role in establishing the Oracle Academic Initiative in Pakistan, which has trained hundreds of professionals.

Recognition

During his tenure with Informatica, Abbasi received several awards for his performance. Abbasi won the Chairman of the Year Award from the American Business Awards in 2010 and was ranked second by Institutional Investor's annual survey of software company CEO's in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, ''Bloomberg'' ranked Abbasi second on its Top 20 list of technology leaders. In 2014, according to ''Forbes'', Abbasi was one of the top 5 best CEOs to work for in the Enterprise Software business in 2014.