Innovators in the Cloud

New technologies, especially those classified as disruptive, can sometimes face difficulties being accepted and adopted.  Cloud computing, while still relatively new, has had its fair share of obstacles to overcome and probably wouldn’t be where it is today without the efforts of several pioneering leaders in technology.  Last week on Information Week, Charles Babcock shared a very interesting article that detailed a list of individuals who are responsible for great innovation as far as cloud computing is concerned.  While Babcock admits that his list is neither exhaustive nor all-inclusive, he has compiled an excellent list of early pioneers in cloud computing.  Below we are sharing some of the choices from this list with our readers.

Werner Vogels

It seems like you can’t talk about cloud innovation without mentioning Amazon and the first name in Babcock’s list is Werner Vogels - the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and Vice President of Amazon Web Services.  Vogels played an integral part in getting Amazon into the business of distributing virtual server computing cycles over the Internet and charging on a basis of time. Vogels has also been a staunch advocate of greater use of Amazon’s public cloud. 

Chris Pinkham

Chris Pinkham is another Amazon employee who has made a notable contribution to cloud computing.  Pinkham was the designer of Amazon Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2). Pinkham collaborated with Amazon software architect to create Amazon’s first public cloud infrastructure.

Jonathan Bryce

Jonathan Bryce headed up a website building and hosting business, Mosso Cloud, in 2005.  Bryce’s company expanded and became Rackspace Cloud, competitive with Amazon Web Services.  Bryce is now an executive director for OpenStack Foundation.

Lew Tucker

Lew Tucker has over 20 years of experience in the Information Technology field and was an early supporter of cloud computing.  Tucker was CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems between 2008 and 2012 before leaving after the Oracle acquisition.  Currently, Tucker is the CTO of cloud computing at Cisco Systems as well as an Openstack board member.

Rich Wolski

Rich Wolski is the co-founder and CTO of Eucalyptus Systems, provider of open source code counterparts to Amazon’s public cloud APIs.  Although Wolski was initially criticized for his ideas surrounding his open source project, Amazon announced in May that it would partner with Eucalyptus Systems to provide private cloud APIs. 

Chris Kemp

Chris Kemp is the former CTO of NASA who is responsible for creating the Nebula cloud project, which collected big data from NASA research projects including the Mars mapping project.  Kemp also spearheaded a mobile cloud data center that could be transported to different locations to provide onsite compute power, regardless of where a spacecraft was launched or an interplanetary mission was managed.  Currently, Kemp is living in Northern California and working as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and founder of Nebula. 

If you would like to view the rest of the entries on Chris Babcock’s list and read the full details of each cloud pioneer, you can view Mr. Babcock’s interesting article here: http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-cloud-computing-pioneers/240142397