Jaroslav Bláha

Born on 08. October 1963 in Jablonec nad Nisou (German: Gablonz) in Czechoslovakia, which at that time was the world's center for high quality costume jewelry.

Escaped in June 1970 through the Iron Curtain of the Warsaw Pact to Germany, where I have 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 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 M.Sc. in Computer Science. In my thesis I had the honour to participate in the development of the first autonomous car.

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 office automation software, networking, IT-security, and some programming for the German Ministry of Defense.

After 3+ years I became bored and in June 1991 was transferred to the NATO Headquarters for Central Europe AFCENT in Brunssum/The Netherlands. Suddenly, I was project manager for multi-national IT and communications projects comprising 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.

Twelve years passed and on 30. June 1995 my contract with the military expired. Immediatelly, I signed a contract as civilian employee with NATO. This brought me a job at the NATO Programming Centre in Glons/Belgium and a lot of fun with the development of a state-of-the-art air traffic control and air defense system (MASE).

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 Software 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. The biggest mandate was as the overall programme manager for development of the DB Schenker global transport management system TANGO, which was successfully completed by a team of ca. 400 experts and deployed to 117 countries.

In order to avoid the worst boredom, a second company was founded with a partner in 2007 to focus on outsourcing business operations to the wonderful country Vietnam. It was not successful. 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, where I have fundamentally restructured the organization and technology towards agile and cloud-based concepts.

Already in my 2nd master thesis (M.Sc. Economics in Computer Science) in 1995, I have explored artificial intelligence (AI) 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. In February 2018, as the CEO and Co-Founder, we created CellmatiQ. In November 2019, CellmatiQ was amongst the first companies worldwide to commercially offer a certified (!) medical AI image analysis system in combination with a respective patent application. End of 2022 we sold the company to a large medical chain to further expand the technology.

After several interim mandates in the CIO/CTO domain, e.g. for PAYBACK in Munich and as lecturer for Artificial Intelligence and Big Data at the Hochschule Fresenius in Hamburg, the next challenge came from yet another industry.

trivago is the globally dominant search engine for hotel accomodations, where I had the pleasure to work as the CIO/CTO with an amazing team from nearly 80 countries out of Düsseldorf. From 2022 to early 2024 we have conducted an organizational transformation, an upgrade of the infrastructure into the cloud, and a systematic strengthening of the data science and AI group. The trivago parties are legendary...

It is summer 2024 and after a lengthy sabbatical with plenty of education (e.g. quantum computing concepts, upgraded pilot license, ...), stand by for my next steps.