Profiles

William O’Connell received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1995.

Dr. O’Connell retired from IBM in 2024 after 25 years as an executive working in both IBM Research and IBM Development Laboratories. Dr. O’Connell held the title of IBM Distinguished Engineer for over 20 years and was the CTO for IBM’s Analytical Group and Data Warehousing areas. Prior to IBM, he worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, for 13 years. His development experiences include being the chief architect for IBM DB2 for distributed systems, owning the Query Compiler, and later, he drove development direction for IBM Analytics and Warehousing. While at AT&T Bell Laboratories Research, he was a Senior Technical Staff Member. His development and research focus was on core massively parallel database technology. He interjected his work into the Teradata massively parallel commercial database. The largest commercial parallel database capable of processing 100s of Terabytes of active data from the early 1990s. While at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in the latter 1990s, he was an adjunct professor at Princeton University. And while employed at the IBM Toronto Laboratory in the early to mid-2000s, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Dr. O’Connell focused his earliest research on core database technology and systems programming. His work later shifted to the evolution of Hadoop and Object Stores, and finally to pushing parallelable and scalable analytics and embedded AI into business processes and end user tooling. He has extensively published and received many patents.