Key Players

By TR Editors

Werner Vogels
Amazon
The CTO of Amazon.com brought cloud computing to the masses in March 2006, when he started selling the spare capacity of Amazon's massive server infrastructure to anyone with a credit card.

Jim Blakley
Intel
Blakley is the director of data-center virtualization at Intel, which is developing energy-efficient processors and solid-state hard drives for cloud systems--a big deal for data centers that suck down megawatts of electricity.

Reuven Cohen
Enomaly
The founder and CTO of Enomaly, which develops software to help companies create and manage cloud systems in their data centers, Cohen was instrumental in proposing the Open Cloud Manifesto, calling for interoperability standards among cloud providers. The recent proposal has sparked a heated debate in the industry.

Dave Douglas
Sun
Douglas led the launch of Sun's Open Cloud Platform in March of this year. He is a supporter of the Eucalyptus open-source cloud project, which could help provide de facto standards for cloud
computing.

Kevin Gibbs
Google
The technical lead for Google App Engine, a platform launched in 2008 that hosts and offers services for Web-based software, Gibbs is extending App Engine beyond low-cost startups to corporate users, allowing them to create larger-scale applications.

Kristof Kloeckner
IBM
IBM's cloud-computing CTO oversees the Blue Cloud series of products. Kloeckner is an advocate for open standards and software, and he wants public clouds to be interoperable with those that run on private data centers.

Ray Ozzie
Microsoft
Microsoft's chief software architect is leading the company away from its roots in PC software toward applications and services that run remotely on servers. Ozzie is trying to develop a cloud-based system that unifies the software across devices, from mobile phones to television screens.

James Urquhart
Cisco
Urquhart, the product marketing manager for cloud computing and virtualized data centers at Cisco, influences the design of critical cloud hardware. An early evangelist for cloud computing, he writes The Wisdom of Clouds, a popular blog on the subject.