Employee Spotlight: Rob Walsh

Each month, we will be featuring a different employee in our Employee Spotlight series. This series was born with the belief that your life experiences make you the unique person you are today and influence what you bring to the amazing culture here at Actian. We have chosen to feature those incredible individuals with a blog post dedicated to them.

For this month’s Employee Spotlight, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Rob Walsh, who was recently promoted to VP of IT.

My first trip out to Round Rock, as I was greeting the team, I couldn’t help noticing a flip chart sitting atop Rob’s desk indicating (warning) others of his current mood – chipper. Most recently, it has been stagnating on ‘Fabulous’, which he cleverly added a blue post-it to make it read ‘Absolutely Fabulous’, a reference to one of his favorite British Sitcoms. It is no surprise that with Rob’s sense of humor and personality, he is a staple to the thriving culture in the Round Rock office.

Rob was born in a hospital in Hospital – a quaint town in Ireland. His family moved to Houston, TX, and later moved to South Africa, where he finished school. Initially, Rob set out to be a motor mechanic. This seemed to be a great plan, as he has a love for fast cars and rebuilding motors. But after realizing that he didn’t like being dirty all the time, he found himself moving to Port Elizabeth, South Africa to study Mechanical Engineering. Around 1995, Rob began doing consulting in IT and soon became IT Manager. One of the major appeals was how terribly logical it is and how no two days are the same.

When asked, “What drew you to Actian?”, he casually replied with laughter “Pervasive”. Rob had joined Pervasive Software as the Director of IT Operations in 2007, and in 2013, Pervasive was acquired by Actian. Since then, he has continued to grow in his role and provides Actian with phenomenal support internally, as well as overseeing the public-facing cloud environments.

As a people manager for the better part the past three decades, the most important thing he has learned in his career is, “Take care of your people. You are as good as your people – and that’s all there is to it.”  When Rob is not in the office, he still enjoys fast cars and can be found some weekends at Longhorn Racing! We are thrilled to have Rob as part of the Actian family and VP team.

Interested in working at Actian? Check out our open roles and apply today!

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Rae is the Director, Employee Experience at Actian, focusing on bringing the employee experience to the next level. She is committed to developing strategic programs that help employees feel more empowered in their roles. Rae has a background in People Operations, focused on up leveling and implementing best practice and process adoption across global organizations.