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Jaroslav Bláha

Jaroslav Blaha

  Born in Jablonec nad Nisou in Czechoslovakia on 08. October 1963. Jablonec, or in German Gablonz, is still the world's center for high quality costume jewelry.

Escaped in June 1970 to Germany. I spent a wonderful youth in Lindau in southern Bavaria. Very nice old town with approx. 25.000 inhabitants, which is crowded with tourists in summer and dead in winter.

On 04 July 1983, I started my limited career as a soldier in the famous German Air Force. The first steps were Officers Academy (including sea and land survival training with 3rd degree frost-bite) and 3+ years of fun at the Munich Armed Forces University, which finished with an MSc in Computer Science.

Real life started in 1988 when I became Chief Instructor at the German AirForce Technical Academy in Augsburg. The job was to build up the training facilities covering application software, networking, IT-security and some programming for the German Ministry of Defense.

After 3+ years I became bored and in June 1991 was moved out of the country to the NATO Headquarters AFCENT in Brunssum/The Netherlands. Suddenly, I was project manager for multi-national IT and communications projects comprising everything between mobile command and control centers, interoperability, video-teleconferencing and office-automation LANs. The working environment was the worst in my life! It was somewhat funny to have (mostly) life pigeons in the office, although the broken windscreens were a bit unpleasant in winter time.

On 30 June 1995 my contract with the military expired and I was a free man... Until I signed a contract as a civilian employee with NATO. This brought me a job at the NATO Programming Centre in Belgium and a lot of fun with the development of a state-of-the-art air traffic control and air defense system.

The fun quickly faded in summer 1997 and it was time to look for a new perspective. So back to project management and engineering in NATO´s most interesting and extensive project ACCS LOC1, being responsible as the Chief Architect to build a modern European air and ballistic missile defense system. When the smog was low I could even see the Brussels Atomium from our office building.

11 years and 29 days in NATO was enough! Before I got my own stock number allocated, I have decided to resign and start a new career in industry by joining a small consulting company in Düsseldorf as Managing Partner and Chief Technology Officer.

... as a side-effect, I have spent ca. two years living in Versailles, while working as the Chief System Design for Thales Raytheon Systems, the main industry partner for the NATO ACCS project.

Four successful years and many experiences later, I decided to pursue business on my own: In 2006, Blaha Executive Consulting GmbH was founded and was primarily active in the management of large-scale, multi-national IT and logistics projects, e.g. for the DB Schenker global transport management system TANGO.

In order to avoid the worst boredom, a second company, Xenadi GmbH, was co-founded by me in 2007 to initially focus on outsourcing business operations to Vietnam. Both companies were merged to Xenadi GmbH in June 2011.

In April 2015, I moved into a completely new domain and became the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the transmission system operator (TSO) of the Swiss electricity grid Swissgrid AG in Laufenburg (Switzerland).

In July 2015, I was offered the CTO post for the new innovation program and internal startup R3PI of Solera Holdings, Inc.. Being responsible for the technological activities in newly founded offices in London, Dallas, and Zürich keept me on the move.
One year and many experiences later, I accepted the responsibility as the Global CIO/CTO of all Solera IT operations across 60+ business units in ca. 80 countries and have fundamentally restructured organization and technology towards agile and cloud-based concepts.

Already in my 2nd master thesis in 1996, I have explored artificial intelligence and neural networks. By now the technology is mature enough for wide-scale adoption and commercial use. One of the most promising fields is healthcare and there in particular automated medical diagnostics. It is December 2017, and as the CEO and Co-Founder of CellmatiQ, I aim to advance this technology together with some awesome partners.

 


A little outline of my Tour-de-Europe; so far!

Map of moves

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