"Angela Johnson's career began at a call center where she performed technical and customer support and end-user training for legal clients having trouble with the online legal research and database service WestLaw. But after a few years, during which time parent company West was acquired by Thomson Reuters, Johnson moved to Rockwell Automation, a manufacturing automation company whose products gathered and analyzed data about specific parts being machined on factory and plant floors. "I am one of a rare breed whose brain seems to intuitively understand the linear nature and thinking required to work with relational databases, I guess, and Rockwell recognized that. We had so many clients on so many different databases, but I was able to help with the technical aspects of extracting that data from Oracle, SQL, Sybase, all these different databases and analyzing it," Johnson says. She was lured away by Oracle and then, after the database giant's acquisition of retail management software company Retek in 2005, split her time between database management functions and serving as a technical trainer, teaching Retek departments and development teams to design and build custom database software."

Sharon Florentine