John DesJardins is senior principal solution architect, focused on data and AI, at Rocket Software. He has been a hands-on CTO and Fractional CTO, driving innovation in real-time data and AI. His career includes leadership roles at Hazelcast, Cloudera, Software AG, and webMethods, partnering with Global 2000 firms such as HSBC, BNP Paribas, Morgan Stanley, Visa, Target, Walmart, Honeywell, GE, and many others to innovate with real-time data integration, analytics, and AI/ML systems with zero downtime. He has extensive experience with payments and trading systems, as well as Internet of Things.
As Hazelcast Chief Technology Officer, he directed engineering strategy to create a leader in real-time processing capable of billions of events per second with a 10X performance advantage over Flink or Spark and introduce a unified SQL API that simultaneously processes streaming and stored data. He also spearheaded an OEM partnership with IBM including working closely with their Cloud and IBM z Platform teams, and was named an IBM Champion in 2022. John also drove co-engineering work with Red Hat and Intel.