Benjamin Black—who claims a role in the creation of modern cloud computing at Amazon—is now joining one of the key companies providing the rather complex tools that allow the world’s businesses to fashion of their own cloud computing services.
This week, Black moved to Pivotal, the rather ambitious outfit spun out of big-name tech companies EMC and VMware. From his home-base in Seattle, the former Amazon and Microsoft engineer will run what he calls an “internet-of-things” lab, helping Pivotal develop tools that allow businesses to juggle data from a wide range of disparate computing devices, including environmental sensors.
“THese are sensors that indicate a car went over a certain point on road, temperature and humidity sensors in a soy bean field,” he says. “What you need is the ability to sometimes simple, sometimes sophisticated analytics with these, so that ultimately to can see a picture emerge from a vast collection of tiny dots.”
Pivotal offers a wide range of tools for building online services that can drive sweeping software applications and juggle data across thousands of machine—in other words, online services for the modern world. The company’s work is centered around a sweeping piece of software called Cloud Foundry, and Black’s work will dovetail with this foundational tool.
While at Amazon a decade ago, Black helped gestate the idea of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, the service that kickstarted modern cloud computing, letting businesses and developer run websites and other software without setting up their own hardware. Such services changed the way the world built software. As a result, Microsoft and Google started offering similar cloud services, and old school hardware makers like HP, Dell, and EMC were forced to revamped their businesses.
His move to Pivotal a convenient symbol for this changing world.
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