We’ve saved the icing on the cake for last.
We’re incredibly proud to announce that Raghu Ramakrishnan, CTO for Data and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, will be our keynote speaker at Data Platform Next Step 2025 in Billund, Denmark!
Raghu is one of the brilliant minds behind Microsoft’s bold and refreshing vision for the future of data: an open data lake ecosystem where customers are no longer locked into walled gardens. Under his leadership, Microsoft is doubling down on open formats, open APIs, and multi-engine access to a single copy of data—empowering organizations to build truly flexible, future-proof data architectures.
In a world where most vendors still want to trap your data, Raghu is helping lead Microsoft in the opposite direction: open lakes that play well with others. This is more than talk—recent moves like expanding the partnership with Snowflake to bring their compute engine directly into OneLake are just the beginning.
But Raghu’s credentials go far beyond his work at Microsoft. Before joining the company, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he co-authored the widely used textbook Database Management Systems. His groundbreaking research has earned him prestigious honors, including the SIGMOD Innovations Award and recognition as an ACM Fellow.
Following the high bar set by Justyna Lucznik and Bogdan Crivat won’t be easy—but we know Raghu will deliver a keynote full of technical depth, big-picture thinking, and absolutely no marketing fluff. Just the way we like it.
We can’t wait to welcome him to the stage in Billund.