828: When Finance Talks to the Business | Claire Bramley, CFO, Teradata

Turn back the clock on her HP years, and we see Bramley being recruited as a technical accountant in the UK before shortly thereafter being dispatched to the FP&A trenches of HP’s EMEA headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.       

“It was intense learning for me at the time, but it was really helpful because it immediately made me realize that you have to understand the business to add value,” comments Bramley, who let us know that it was during her early days in Geneva that she first started joining HP’s bigger discussion, where she quickly began to amplify the concerns and challenges facing HP’s EMEA country management.

“I was pushing corporate and I was pushing the worldwide team and, to be honest, I think that they were like, ‘This is really becoming quite annoying—who is this person?,'” recalls Bramley, who received a number of promotions before being transferred to the U.S. to oversee HP’s worldwide FP&A team from its Palo Alto, California, headquarters.

“Suddenly, I was on the other side of the fence looking back from the corporate perspective, and I realized how there’s not just one way of looking at things,” says Bramley, who lets us know that her contribution to the bigger discussion broadened as she climbed into upper management.

Before advancing into HP’s global controller role, Bramley would once more be stationed in Geneva, this time serving as EMEA’s head of finance—a role that required her to be regularly engaged with EMEA’s sales leaders. It was here, Bramley tells us, amidst the everyday back-and-forth with some of HP’s top sales professionals, where she really began to glean an insight that every finance executive should keep in mind as they join the broader discussion.

She explains: “There were explanations as to why something wasn’t what we expected it to be, and I remember taking these at face value and not digging down to the next level of detail. About a month later, I came to realize the error of my ways, and the strategic lesson for me was to let the data tell the story.” –Jack Sweeney

What sets us apart is the fact that we are a hybrid solution. We have not only a best-in-class on-premises product but also a differentiated cloud solution. Think about how much data you have in the world today and how many different places in global enterprises you have this data. What we do at Teradata is to provide software to allow you to use the data where it resides and pull it all together without moving it. We enable the largest enterprise companies in the world to achieve really high-end performance in scale analytics on their data.

We’re supporting some of the biggest companies in the world with their data and analytics. We started with many of them as on-premises partners, and now we’re on this cloud transformation journey. We believe that hybrid is the future—not 100% percent cloud and not 100% on-premises. We have built what is industry-recognized as a best-in-class multi-cloud software offering that provides data and analytics to help large global enterprises have better insights and solutions so that they can make better decisions.

We have a great future ahead of us in terms of growth. We started in 2020 at $100 million from cloud, and now we have this hittable target of $1 billion from cloud by 2025. To get there, we’ll continue to focus on our own data and metrics.

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“We are continuing on our cloud transformation journey and whereas we started in 2020 at $100 million in cloud revenue, we now have this target to be at $1 billion of cloud revenue by 2025. So we are continuing to focus on cloud ARR growth, but profitable growth over the next 12 months, while at the same time making sure that we’re investing in innovation.” -Claire Bramley, CFO, Teradata