Expanded executive depth to deliver sharper focus on benefits for enterprise developers and CIOs; former CEO Sam Ramji takes new Google executive role
San Francisco, November 17, 2016 — Cloud Foundry, the industry-standard multi-cloud platform, today promoted Abby Kearns to the role of Executive Director and named Chip Childers Chief Technology Officer. Former Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji has accepted a new executive role at Google Cloud.
“Abby and Chip have the skills and vision to take Cloud Foundry to the next level, broadening its reach to include enterprise developers and the Global 2000 in their digital transformation journey,” said John Roese, Chair of Cloud Foundry Foundation and CTO and EVP of Cross Product Operation at Dell EMC. “Sam built an incredible organization and established Cloud Foundry as a leader in helping Global 2000 enterprises find success in the cloud. Abby and Chip will build on that success.”
Having joined the Foundation as its first fellow, Kearns brings a wealth of experience as a leader in technology and cloud services. In her most recent role at the Foundation as VP of Strategy, Kearns was responsible for structuring and executing operational and strategic initiatives, as well as leading the User Advisory Board and Industry Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Prior to joining the Foundation, Kearns was on the customer-facing product management team at VMware where she worked directly with a broad swath of Global 2000 companies including Home Depot, GE, Ford and Charles Schwab. At Verizon, she led a Product Management and Product Marketing team focused on cloud services.
“The next stage of Cloud Foundry is to help drive cloud innovation deeper into the enterprise,” said Kearns. “We want to double down on our work with enterprise CIOs as they transform their businesses to become digital innovators. At the same time, we want to empower the ecosystem of cloud developers to build more applications, more quickly.”
Childers has spent more than 18 years in large-scale computing and open source software. In 2015, he became the co-founder of the Cloud Foundry Foundation as Technology Chief of Staff. He was the first VP of Apache Cloudstack, a platform he helped drive while leading Enterprise Cloud Services at SunGard and then as VP Product Strategy at Cumulogic. Prior to SunGard, he led the rebuild of mission-critical applications for organizations including IRS.gov, USMint.gov, Merrill Lynch and SEI Investments.
“The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is driving a massive shift for the largest industries in the world, including heavy industry, automotive, financial services, national governments, and even the software industry itself. We need to embrace the engineers who make this possible,” said Childers. “Our collective mission is to provide the industry standard platform underpinning the successful transition of organizations into modern digital enterprises.”
After two years of building industry momentum and a solid leadership team at the Foundation, Ramji moves to Google Cloud where he will continue his work on public cloud computing and open-source technologies such as Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes.
Cloud Foundry is collectively developed by Cisco, EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, VMware, SAP, VMware and leaders in manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. Only Cloud Foundry delivers the velocity needed to continuously deliver apps at the speed of business. Cloud Foundry’s container-based architecture runs apps in any language on your choice of cloud – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Platform (GCP), OpenStack, VMware vSphere, SoftLayer and more. With a robust services ecosystem and simple integration with existing technologies, Cloud Foundry is the modern standard for mission critical apps for global organizations.
About Cloud Foundry Foundation
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard multi-cloud platform. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: https://www.cloudfoundry.org.
##
Contact:
Jessica Rampen
Cloud Foundry Foundation
[email protected]
650-787-3548
