In 1996, he left IBM to become a consultant and entrepreneur.[2] In 1999, Brown co-founded SmartArrays, Inc. with James Wheeler, and has held a senior position in the company for many years.[2] The firm develops specialized analytic software based on columnar databases, with memory-resident vector processing, for uses where customers consider commercial off-the-shelf software to be more expensive, slow, or limited. Note: SmartArrays ceased operations and the corporation was dissolved as of February 2019