With more than 25 years of experience in Data, Cloud, and IT, Alexander Walden brings a unique blend of deep technical expertise and business leadership to his role as CEO of Ververica. Over the past decade, he has led international IT companies and teams through periods of growth and digital transformation, always with a focus on turning complex technologies into practical business value.
Holding both an MBA and a Master of IT Management, Walden has built his career across American, German, and global organizations—giving him a truly international perspective on enterprise innovation. Passionate about building high-performing teams and driving transformation, he thrives at the intersection of technology and business strategy. At Ververica, this approach fuels the company’s mission to make real-time data streaming and AI a catalyst for customer success and competitive advantage.
Career Journey: Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career, especially one that shaped your leadership approach at your current company?
Early in my career, I learned a pivotal lesson during a conversation where I focused too heavily on features and not enough on business value. It was a moment where I realized that true transformation starts by understanding how people can succeed through technology, not because of it. At Ververica, this translates directly into how we build our Unified Streaming Data Platform. We don’t just talk about features, speeds, and feeds. Instead, we ask: “How do we help an engineer deploy AI into production to scale their jobs?” or “How do we operate a fraud detection model at record speed to detect in milliseconds, not minutes?” This lens allows us to connect product capabilities to customer outcomes for business-aligned ROI innovation.
Career Path: Solving Complexity at Scale: From IT Architecture to CEO
Career Path: What initially brought you to this specific career path, and how did it lead to your role in this company?
I’ve always worked at the intersection of IT architecture, business leadership, and transformation. Prior to joining Ververica, I led international teams across cloud and professional services, including roles at VMware (now Broadcom) and T-Systems. The unifying thread in every role has been solving complexity at scale. That’s exactly what Ververica does. We unify and democratize high-performance stream processing based on Apache Flink for enterprises, which allows businesses to extract value from their data quickly. When I joined as CEO, it was with the mission to accelerate that transformation and scale our impact across industries. Today, that vision is a reality. Our technology powers real-time decision-making for some of the world’s most data-driven companies, helping them innovate faster, deliver smarter customer experiences, and unlock entirely new business models.
Company Differentiation: How Ververica Shapes the Future of Stream Processing and Real-Time Data
Company Differentiation: What makes your company stand out from competitors in the market? Can you share an example that highlights this?
What sets Ververica apart is that we aren’t just a player in the stream processing market; we shape it. From our origins as the original creators of Apache Flink, we’ve paired open-source innovation with enterprise-grade platform engineering for real-time AI impact. Take, for example, our customer Booking.com. We helped them transition from managing 20 Flink applications manually to orchestrating over 250 with Ververica’s Unified Streaming Data Platform. That shift reduced their deployment time from 30 minutes to under 4 minutes. Illustrating how we combine developer velocity with enterprise resilience.
Product Innovation: Advancing Streaming Data Platforms: VERA, AI Agents, and Machine Learning
Product Innovation: Are you working on any exciting new products or projects? How do you think this innovation will positively impact your customers?
One of the innovations we’re most excited about is within the core engine of our platform, VERA. We’ve advanced VERA with Dynamic Complex Event Processing and Flink-native machine learning, to name a few. These capabilities are key for enabling organizations to detect and act on fraud, risk, or operational anomalies in milliseconds.
Building on this, we’re also contributing to Flink Agents, a new Apache Flink sub-project designed to bring AI agents, powered by large language models and tool integrations, directly into Flink’s event-driven runtime. This means businesses can run intelligent, context-aware agents natively within their streaming pipelines, enabling real-time reasoning, decision-making, and automated action as data flows in.
This isn’t just about faster data processing; it’s about transforming how businesses defend and optimize themselves in real time. For example, our customer One Mount Group utilises this to prevent fraud across millions of e-wallet transactions every day. By giving our customers the ability to predict, decide, and act instantly, we’re helping them turn streaming data into not only a competitive advantage but also a line of defense for their business.
Strategy & Success: Strategic Shifts: Prioritizing Flexibility and the Rise of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
Success Insight: What was the tipping point for your company’s recent success? Was there a change in strategy or approach that others might learn from?
To be successful, we’ve altered our strategy to meet the needs of the market by prioritizing flexibility and scale, and pivoting our strategy towards market landscape changes. For example, our deployment options are more flexible for what works for enterprises with the introduction last year of our Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment model. Enterprises increasingly want the flexibility of cloud-native deployments with the control of their own environments. BYOC achieves both.
Industry Challenges & Lessons: Making Streaming Technology Accessible to Every Industry
Challenges and Lessons: Can you share a significant challenge your company faced and how you overcame it? What key lesson did that experience provide?
One of our ongoing challenges has been making advanced streaming technologies accessible to industries that are new to real-time data. Over time, we’ve seen real-time data streaming evolve from being a competitive advantage to a necessity for survival across many sectors. To support this shift, we’ve moved beyond simply providing Flink to helping organizations build complete streaming architectures covering everything from ingestion to feature pipelines with technologies like Apache Paimon for real-time data lakehouse capabilities and Apache Fluss for high-performance streaming storage. Our goal has been to make these architectures not only scalable and secure but also simple enough for teams at any stage of their streaming journey to adopt. The key lesson? Meet users where they are today, but provide a clear, guided path to the streaming and real-time capabilities they’ll need tomorrow.
Leadership & Culture: Transformation Through Adaptable Leadership at Ververica
Leadership Impact: In just a few words, what differentiates your leadership role from others in the company? What impact does this have on company culture or product success?
I lead with a principle I’ve implemented throughout my career: transformation is only valuable if it’s adaptable. At Ververica, this means aligning our engineering roadmap with customer outcomes, not just technical milestones. It’s a cultural stance I’ve implemented throughout the organization – allowing us to simplify and drive success, fast.
Q: What is real-time data streaming, and why is it important for IT enterprises?
A: Real-time data streaming refers to the continuous processing and analysis of data as it is generated, allowing organizations to react instantly to events, transactions, and insights. For modern enterprises, this capability enables faster decision-making, improved customer experiences, and immediate detection of risks or opportunities – elements vital for staying competitive in fast-moving industries.
Q: How does Ververica help businesses improve their data operations?
A: Ververica’s Unified Streaming Data Platform, built on Apache Flink, empowers organizations to process large volumes of data with low latency. It enables automation, real-time analytics, and AI integration, allowing businesses to detect fraud, optimize operations, and launch new services that rely on instant data processing, all while ensuring scalability and reliability.
Q: How can artificial intelligence be integrated into enterprise data platforms?
A: Artificial intelligence is being woven into data platforms through features like machine learning models, intelligent event detection, and automated decision-making. With solutions such as Ververica’s AI agents natively integrated in streaming pipelines, enterprises can automate complex processes, identify anomalies in real time, and improve operational efficiency with minimal human intervention.
Q: What are the common challenges companies face when integrating streaming data?
A: Companies often struggle with the complexity of deploying and scaling streaming data solutions, integrating them with legacy systems, and upskilling teams. Overcoming these challenges requires choosing user-friendly platforms, leveraging educational resources (like Ververica Academy), and collaborating with partners experienced in guiding organizations through the streaming adoption journey. Simplifying architectures and supporting gradual adoption are key success factors.
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