Vincent Lextrait

Vincent is the founder of Metaspex. He spent his entire career in the technology industry, in research, engineering, team management and business responsibilities.

In the mid-1980s, with a Computer Science background, he was curious about the foreign and insular world of business applications. He decided to work for the largest ERP vendor in Europe, a global mainframe/COBOL company (now part of IBM). After a year, he identified a young fledgling company using a different approach, and tried to convince the CTO of the urgency to change and consider open systems. Unfortunately it was to no avail. It took just 2 years for the young company to dominate the market. Vincent had left long before. This became a life lesson. The new kid on the block was SAP.

Vincent decided to dedicate his career to breaking the barriers between Computer Science and Business Applications. After completing his Doctorate at Matra Marconi Space (now Astrium), Vincent joined a startup, ILOG, the leader in advanced OOP and optimization libraries, and continued honing his skills at back-end technology, delivering two C++-based original products, sold to various customers across the world. ILOG is now part of IBM. At this occasion, Vincent became the French head of C++ standardization at ISO.

In 1997, Vincent was head-hunted for a technological transformation job at Amadeus, the Travel Technology Company. He took the job, and was in charge of the move from mainframes to open systems, from iron and up, including developing all the completely original high-performance layers on top of the operating system. With the familiarity he had gained on how Silicon Valley companies operated, he introduced at Amadeus what Steve Jobs used to call "A-player hiring," alongside the culture that comes with it (Metaspex calls it Mentofacturing™). Something very new in Europe. With his team (quite a few of the engineers he hired went later to work for the largest tech companies, Amazon, Google and Facebook), he delivered a completely original infrastructure and an application framework which processes an average of 40,000 transactions per second (by comparison, Google Search processed 67,000 tps in 2019 worldwide). With a colleague, he pitched Amadeus' unique technical know-how to British Airways and Qantas, and without any Airline product, Amadeus was selected against all competitors (among which Sabre, which had a complete set of products) to deliver from scratch a brand new portfolio of core products for these airlines, stunning the market. Amadeus quickly moved from being the last of 4 competitors to dominating the Travel Technology market, competition having now lost any hope to recover. Amadeus today runs the largest multitenant business application cluster in the world, across all industries (not just Travel), with bigger traffic and more stringent SLAs than SAP or Salesforce, to name a few famous companies.

With a Green Card, as Vincent has always kept an unusual hands-on involvement in science, engineering and business (his last tenure at Amadeus was President & CEO of a US-based subsidiary and Business Unit), he decided to start Metaspex in the United States to synthesize everything he learnt during his career, and push a wide set of new concepts in a piece of software. Metaspex's groundbreaking product was born, with its original science, and its patent-pending full implementation.

Vincent has a Doctorate in Computer Science, and an engineering degree from the French Ivy League École des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech).

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.