All Fired Up in Massachusetts: The State's New Wave of Big Data Companies

The state of Massachusetts is a major U.S. center of big data, says Stephen O’Leary, an M&;A advisor with Aeris Partners and executive committee member of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. It’s only poised to get hotter. As managing director of Aeris Partners LLC, Stephen O’Leary spends most of his time on mergers and acquisitions of tech companies: application and infrastructure software, analytical software, business information, digital media companies. Aeris is based in Kendall Square, an area of urban Cambridge, Massachusetts, that’s bursting with IT companies. (Kendall Square is also home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and MIT Sloan Management Review.) In fact, O’Leary has never seen Kendall Square as vibrant as it is right now.
O’Leary also serves as a trustee and member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC), a business association focused on “fostering entrepreneurship and promoting the success of companies that develop and deploy technology across industry sectors.” O’Leary was MassTLC’s chairman in 2009 and 2010.
During his tenure as MassTLC’s chair, O’Leary ushered in the “MassTLC 2020 Challenge”: An effort to spur the state’s technology industry to create 100,000 new IT jobs and an additional 163,000 related non-IT jobs over the next 10 years.
In this conversation with David Kiron, executive editor of Innovation Hubs at MIT Sloan Management Review, O’Leary talks about why the Kendall Square region of the state is so hot, what new companies he’s paying attention to, and why he’s especially intrigued with the idea of embedding power sources right into the nation’s highways.