“I like to think I’ve lost my southern accent over the years. My friends in Arkansas and Texas think I’m a Yankee now.”

Robin Fleming, Teradata Marketing Applications VP of Quality Management and Security, has not lost her southern accent. Despite moving to Indianapolis to work for Teradata Applications in 2011, her Arkansas (where she grew up) and Texas (where she moved after college) roots are immediately evident.

She and her husband David, a Purdue-trained chemical engineer from Greenfield, met on a blind date in Dallas. Over the course of their 25-year marriage, they made many trips to Indianapolis to visit David’s family. They still live in in the Indy area.

The first of those trips was in the winter of 1988, when she came to Indy to meet David’s parents. “It was below-zero temperatures. I had never been in below zero temperatures in my life…His parents knew that I was kind of a fragile flower. They had the car warmed up and had blankets all ready for me.”” Between that cold first experience with Indy and the limited tech jobs at the time, they held off on a move back to David’s hometown.

Despite her initial hesitation, Robin started to fall in love with the Midwest. “For me, the change of seasons is magical. I lived in the south for a long time, and in Texas it’s pretty much tornado season or not.” Plus, through it all, David had season tickets for Purdue football and basketball, even when they lived in Texas.

As their interest in coming home became more serious, Robin started plugging in, following the IBJ, TechPoint and other such organizations in Indianapolis. “I came across this great company called Aprimo. It just so happened that they had a role open that sounded perfect for me.” Robin is all about software and cloud computing. In Dallas, she ran global quality and configuration management for Match.com.

Over the Christmas holiday in 2010, Robin went into the Aprimo office while she and David were in town. After a meeting with Bill Godfrey and the rest of the leadership team, they asked her to come back, not the next day but the day after.

“The next day I woke up and looked at my email and saw a newsletter from IBJ and it said, ‘Teradata buys Aprimo’.” She got a phone call from the Aprimo team that day asking if she was ready to come back into the office. “I said, ‘Well yeah, but you guys have got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

She took the role, running quality, documentation, release management, etc. for the marketing applications division. “Even if Teradata hadn’t bought the company, I would have taken the job. I loved the company and I loved the people…It was one of those situations where I just knew it was the right thing to do.”

After four months, Robin was asked to focus on the marketing SaaS solution, expanding the team, expanding the service offerings and putting more infrastructure in place. Her role was quickly expanded to run cloud services and operations for the entire marketing applications division. Her most recent transition was to her current role running corporate quality and security across the marketing applications division.

Robin and David’s time in Indy has been filled with career success family and friends, just what they envisioned when they made the move from Dallas four years ago. “We’ve had a really soft landing in Indianapolis…It was absolutely the right decision for us at the right time.”

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