Ohio Valley University |Alumni Profile-Bryan Truex

Most people wouldn’t think twice about these common everyday activities. However, global companies like Wal-Mart, Cingular, eBay, Disney, DirectTV and AT&T are very interested in the way consumers interact with their products and services. They are continually tracking these interactions and constantly looking for ways to increase service and value to their customers. And that’s where OVU alumnus Bryan Truex can help.

A self-proclaimed “data warehouse evangelist” for Teradata, a division of NCR, Bryan resides in the growing Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas, where he serves as the Senior Program Director for Teradata’s Communications, Media and Entertainment industry vertical. He spends most of his time traveling the planet, as a “virtual employee,” assisting customers with data warehousing solutions—from concept to implementation.

“My kids think my job is to work on email, talk on the phone and fly on airplanes,” said Truex. “We work with any company that needs an integrated view of their business. We enable companies to bring together--in one place--a normalized view of all their data. This allows them to define how they want to source, store and analyze their most important asset: their data,” Bryan explains. “Beyond that, we also integrate our technology with many other types of enterprise systems to provide ‘active’ enterprise intelligence, equipping front-line business users such as customer service representatives, airport gate agents, and hotel managers with “real-time” data they need to make more informed decisions and interact intelligently with their customers,” he said.

“I grew up in Beallsville and was a vocational-education student in high school. Both my guidance counselor and high school principal told me I couldn’t be that kind of high school student and go to college,” Truex recalled. “I decided I was going to prove them wrong and show them what I could do,” he said.

Armed with a desire to do more with his life, Bryan enrolled at Ohio Valley University in the fall of ‘83. His aunt and uncle, Ed and Sue Neff, were aware of Ohio Valley and he was also assisted by family friends Randy and Jeanette Chapman. “They gave my name to Bruce Taylor, in admissions. He came out to visit me. I had never been away from home and Parkersburg was fairly close. Bruce also got me in touch with Tim Ault, my freshman roommate, over the summer. Tim and I talked, and I made my decision to attend Ohio Valley,” Bryan recalled.

“My first semester on campus was a real eye-opener,” Bryan remembers sharing one bathroom with no less than 16 suitemates in what was then called Lowland Hall. “I remember some guy brought a guitar to campus and kept playing the first five bars of Sweet Home Alabama—over and over and over again. That took some getting used to,” he quipped. “Later I moved up to Suite 8 in the Highland dormitory and roomed with Marvin Holmes, Jon Williams and Tim Ault. We all became great friends,” said Truex.

Bryan quickly adjusted to campus life and strengthened his love for learning. “I knew from day one that I wanted to major in accounting. At the voc-ed school back home I enjoyed the bookkeeping classes I took. I had no idea about accounting theory back then, but I have always enjoyed numbers and working in business,” Bryan said.

Working with numbers and an affinity for business also had an appeal outside the classroom for Bryan. “I was the manager and statistician for the OVU baseball team under Coach Jim Heinerman. I never pledged a social club, but I competed on the business simulation team under Phil Brown,” Truex said. “I had a lot of classes taught by Mr. Brown and he and I have become great friends over the years.”

Bryan affirms that OVU faculty had a profound impact on him while he was on campus and that hard work and effort can be rewarding. “I remember a paper I had to write for R.C. Oliver’s honors English class. I never worked harder and enjoyed a class more! I can’t even recall what the topic was now, but I found that if you spend enough time on it, you can write a paper about anything,” he mused.

Today Bryan works out of his home office and maintains a delicate balance between work and family life. “The best part about my job is that I get to help people all over the world solve their business problems. But it’s important to me to balance that and my family life. I have a great wife, Julie, and I couldn’t do this without her.” Truex noted. He and his wife have four daughters ranging from age 3 to age 21.

“My most rewarding moment in this business came from one of my customers in Brazil,” said Truex. “He told me we not only allowed him to rethink his business intelligence capabilities, but we enabled him to literally reshape his entire business. That’s when I realized we were making a tremendous impact on his operations—including his people and processes.” he noted.

Serving in a global role, Bryan has also had some interesting and unique opportunities while traveling abroad and assisting customers. “I remember when we held a big sales kickoff meeting in the Asia Pacific region and I got to travel to Phuket, Thailand. We were there about a year after the massive Tsunami hit the coast. One of the activities that we conducted was a team building exercise and scavenger hunt,” he recalled.

“It was startling to see how much damage the Tsunami caused. In talking to villagers at the hotel, they told us they lost over 5,000 people in the center of their town—all within a quarter-mile of the hotel where we were staying. It was a big reality check for me,” he observed. “We were there celebrating our recent successes and kicking off our sales meeting in the place of a tragedy where so many people had lost their lives. In a country where people have so little, it was very heartening to see how they’ve picked up and moved on with their lives,” Bryan said.

Another memorable event was a customer conference that Teradata held in Poland. “One night they dressed us up for a gala dinner and took us to the Royal Opera House in Warsaw. We enjoyed a 45 minute private opera (in Polish) before dinner. After that, dinner was served. Everything was fine until the brought out the entrée. It was an unidentifiable meat that looked like corks out of wine bottles. They looked like a pate-covered mini-corndog to me. The menu said it was veal, but we weren’t sure,” he said.

When asked about advice for students planning to attend college today, Bryan is quick to respond. “Students need to be ready for the global economy because it is developing more and more every day. Any opportunity to broaden language skills and gain cross-cultural skills--take advantage of these to prepare for the global workforce,” Bryan advises. “The world is becoming smaller and smaller. Each of us need to understand, and have an appreciation for, cultural differences that manifest themselves in the way people act, think and approach problems,” he said.

“A large amount of time in business is spent dealing with people. And while business schools equip students with many technical and problem solving skills, they do not always teach people skills,” Truex notes. “Do not be afraid to take psychology, sociology and human relations courses to help you better understand the nature of people and what makes them tick.”