English bio and background

Publié le 25 mai 2006 et mis à jour le 26 février 2012 -

Oli­vier Ezratty, Inno­va­tion Stra­te­gies Consulting

olivier(at)oezratty.net, http://www.oezratty.net, @olivez

What I am doing

I am a free­lance consul­tant focu­sing on digi­tal media tech­no­lo­gies and ser­vices with a broad range of inter­ven­tions at the cross­roads of tech­no­logy and marketing:

• With digi­tal media com­pa­nies, I help them build pro­duct mana­ge­ment dis­ci­pline, build plat­forms and eco­sys­tems, do techno-screening and R&D audits. My cus­to­mers include : Bouygues Télé­com and SFR (tele­com), SES Astra (first world­wide satel­lite ope­ra­tor), LG Elec­tro­nics, Net­gem (set-top-box ven­dor), groupe Pages Jaunes (yel­low pages in France) and Sky­rock (Skyblogs).
• In the star­tups eco­sys­tem, I under­take tech­no­logy and busi­ness due-diligence mis­sions for various invest­ment funds such as Axa Pri­vate Equity and I-Source Ges­tion. I am an expert, mem­ber and pre­sident of the selec­tion board from Scien­ti­pôle Ini­tia­tive and the Fina­réa early stage invest­ment fund. I help star­tups build and grow their busi­ness and pro­duct stra­te­gies, as a busi­ness angel and board mem­ber (for ulike.net and Out­wit Tech­no­lo­gies), as board mem­ber and out­side consul­tant (for Dar­q­room), as an inde­pen­dant advi­sor (for Volun­tis) or as a consul­tant (for Miyowa). I also contri­bute in a more sca­leable fashion to enrich the French-speaking star­tups eco­sys­tem with the “Opi­nions Libres” blog and refe­rence docu­ments such as a com­pre­hen­sive Star­tups Guide upda­ted twice a year since 2006. I’m also influen­cing inno­va­tion rela­ted public poli­cies through my blog and my per­so­nal invol­ve­ment with various public authorities.
• I’m also a uni­ver­sity guest spea­ker, cove­ring inno­va­tion stra­te­gies and entre­pre­neur­ship at Ecole Cen­trale Paris, HEC and Mines de Paris.

My blog “Opi­nions Libres” was cra­ted in 2006 and is read mainly by cor­po­rate mar­ke­ting, stra­tegy and eco­no­mic intel­li­gence exe­cu­tives, stu­dents, resear­chers, inves­tors, entre­pre­neurs and jour­na­lists. Each January, I publish a com­pren­sive Consu­mer Elec­tro­nics Show reports of 200+ pages.

My back­ground

I have 26 years of expe­rience in soft­ware research and deve­lop­ment, mar­ke­ting and busi­ness deve­lop­ment. I star­ted in 1985 at Sogi­tec, a wholly owned sub­si­diary of Das­sault Avia­tion, as a soft­ware design engi­neer, then pro­ject mana­ger and group mana­ger of the deve­lop­ment team wor­king on cus­tom elec­tro­nic publi­shing pro­jects. I then became an early adop­ter of the Win­dows plat­form, star­ting pro­jects on its ini­tial 1.0 release.

Star­ting in 1990, I then acqui­red at Micro­soft France a broad expe­rience in all dimen­sions of mar­ke­ting: pro­ducts, chan­nels, cus­to­mer, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and public rela­tions. I laun­ched the first ver­sion of Visual Basic in 1991 as well as Win­dows NT in 1993, and a bunch of part­ner pro­grams. All these are now IT indus­try stan­dards. I became Chief Mar­ke­ting Offi­cer of Micro­soft France in July 1998 where I reen­gi­nee­red inter­nal and exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools, char­ter, pro­cesses and ven­dors, resha­ped its public rela­tions inclu­ding star­ting dea­ling with govern­ment ins­ti­tu­tions, mana­ged customer’s and partner’s tran­si­tion to Year 2000 and Euro, conso­li­da­ted its call centre and tele­sales ope­ra­tions and also laun­ched Win­dows 2000 and Office 2000.

In May 2001, I became Direc­tor of the Deve­lo­per and Plat­form Evan­ge­lism Divi­sion which I crea­ted and staf­fed for the France region. This orga­ni­za­tion of 50+ is char­te­red with dri­ving the adop­tion of the Micro­soft enter­prise plat­form by soft­ware deve­lo­pers, IT pro­fes­sio­nals, soft­ware ven­dors, as well as with the com­pu­ter science aca­de­mia and research. I laun­ched the « .NET » plat­form, new part­ner­ships with the best uni­ver­si­ties, research orga­ni­za­tions and local soft­ware ven­dors, as well as ini­tia­ted the first stra­te­gic .NET pro­jects with large accounts across many indus­tries. I left Micro­soft in 2005 to become a free­lance contri­bu­tor to the inno­va­tion eco­sys­tem in France.

I gra­dua­ted in 1985 from Ecole Cen­trale Paris with a Com­pu­ter Science Msc equivalent.

Pic­tures of me can be found here.

Publié le 25 mai 2006 et mis à jour le 26 février 2012 Page de Olivier Ezratty | 20310 lectures