Same River, New Current: Joining Striim

Times change.  We get older and wiser.  At this point of my career and life, there is so much that is going on; to fully understand, Let me give you the straight story. As of today, August 31st, I’m joining Striim  (www.striim.com) as Senior Director of Product Marketing. And with this move, I’m closing RheoData.

Both of those sentences deserve some context, so here it is.

Six Years of RheoData

When I started RheoData in 2020 (after an Oracle riff), the idea was simple – stay small, stay senior, and stay hands-on!

No bench of junior consultants. Just experienced people doing the work themselves. Over six years, that model carried me and a few others through Department of Defense GoldenGate modernization and migration, trans-Pacific multi-master replication build, trans-Atlantic bi-directional build, real-time pipelines from Oracle into modern cloud data warehouses, and our first production enterprise AI agent and MCP deployments.

RheoData has been a success by every measure that mattered to me – the clients we served, their problems we solved, and the trust we earned along the way. I’m proud of the work, and I’m grateful to every client, partner, and colleague who was part of it.

So why close it?

Because running a consultancy/professional services organization well is an all-in commitment, and after six years I found myself wanting two things it couldn’t give me:

a bigger platform for the next stage of my career
a schedule that aligns better with my family.

When the right opportunity showed up, the decision was made a lot easier. It feels like the right time to move forward.

Why Striim

If you’ve followed my career, this move makes sense.

I’ve spent 30+ years in and around real-time data in some fashion – starting as a DBA after my military service, moving through government contracting, to the financial industry, into consulting at BIAS (now Deloitte), Enkitec (now Accenture Enkitec Group), Accenture, then to Oracle as Director of Product Management for GoldenGate (Core), and finally building RheoData around Change Data Capture (CDC), streaming data, cloud migration, and AI.

Real-time change data capture (CDC) has been the underlying theme of my entire career.

Striim sits squarely in that world and offers a lot that I’m currently interested in. As Senior Director of Product Marketing, I’ll be helping shape how Striim’s products are positioned and where they win against the rest of the data integration/replication landscape – GoldenGate, Fivetran, and others. That’s a category I know from many angles.

I’ve built the product roadmap, delivered the implementations, written the books, and sat on the customer side of the table. Now I get to put all of that to work telling Striim’s story.

And to be clear – my respect for GoldenGate and the Oracle community doesn’t change. That technology and that community shaped my career. Knowing a platform deeply is exactly what makes competitive strategy honest. Customers deserve positioning grounded in how these tools work, not marketing spin. That’s what I intend to bring internally at Striim as well externally to customers.

What This Means for dbasolved

The blog isn’t going anywhere. I started dbasolved (www.dbasolved.com) as a DBA in 2012/2013.  Writing about what I was learning, and that’s still what it is. Expect the content to keep evolving the way my career has – more streaming data, more data integration strategy, more AI – alongside the practical, hands-on material you’ve always found here.

To everyone who worked with or at RheoData over the last six years: thank you!

To the Oracle community that has supported me as an ACE Pro, ACE Director, author, and speaker: thank you!

To the team at Striim: Let’s to get to work! 

— Bobby

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