Dr. Harm van der Lek is an internationally recognized consultant and lecturer on Information Modeling in general and the design of Data Warehouses in particular. He trained over 700 designers in the Benelux.

Van der Lek has published multiple practical and scientific papers. An appreciated speaker, both internationally and in the Netherlands, he has a reputation of being gifted with the ability to present complicated matters clearly, combining a practical attitude with a scientific insight.

As an architect he was in charge of the design of many databases for operational systems, among them several projects of the Dutch railways, and data warehouses as well. The latter for instance for insurance companies in the Netherlands, for the Royal Dutch Airlines and for the social security organization (UWV).

Based on his experience in the BI field, he felt the necessity and the same time the lack of a real Meta Data Driven tool for the design and the deployment of a Data Warehouse environment. That is why he became co-founder of BIReady B.V. and the architect of the Generic Data warehouse product with the same name.

Gertjan Vlug is a born entrepreneur who started his 3rd BI software selling company with BIReady. Before he has been working in the BI area since the late 1980s for BI-toll vendors like Cognos (now IBM - as an international Manager), Business Objects (now SAP - building up the Dutch organization) in Services, Commercial and Management roles.

This expertise and his entrepreneurship made it a natural next step to set up his own business.

His first company was a total-solution organization, reselling best-of-breed tools (mainly well respected BI-tools) together with excellent consultancy, based on best practices.
He also started regional business for companies with promising new BI-products.

In the 90's Gertjan had discussed the lack of generic data warehouse products, where this should bring such a tremendous advantages for organizations in getting the right management information in time, and finally being capable of adopting business requirements in a flexible and accurate way.

It was obvious that Harm and Gertjan together founded BIReady, the company and build the tool that would change the world of Data Warehouses.