Benjamin Black, one of the key resources behind the concept and implementation of Amazon Web Services, joined Pivotal Cloud Foundry as Senior Director of Technology in late February. Black collaborated with Chris Pinkham to write the proposal to build Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) platform that was subsequently approved by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In his new role at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Black will lead an Internet of Things lab in Seattle that represents the cusp of Pivotal’s thought leadership about IoT data aggregation and analytics. After leading an engineering team at Amazon Web Services, Black worked at Microsoft before becoming CEO and Founder of Boundary. Black’s addition to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry team constitutes the latest of high profile hires including Joshua McKenty, former CEO of Piston Cloud Computing and OpenStack co-founder and Andrew Clay Shafer, co-founder of Puppet Labs. The announcement of Black’s hire comes head on the heels of Pivotal’s decision to open source its Big Data Suite and enter into a strategic partnership with Hortonworks. Pivotal is a spinoff of EMC and VMware that aims to drive a transformation of contemporary IT by bringing the power of cloud computing, Big Data, agile application development and real-time analytics to the modern enterprise.
Cloud Computing Today 