Today, Pivotal is proud to announce that Microsoft and eBay veteran Hugh E. Williams is joining Pivotal to lead our Research & Development team. Obviously, anytime a company hires a new Senior Vice President of R&D, this is big news for the company. In this case, however, this is big news for the software development industry as a whole.
Simply put, Pivotal’s mission is to help any company to develop software like internet giants. The idea is to build a software platform that developers can use to unleash their own productivity and help them produce high quality software with support for big data and devices baked into the framework. Our name for this software is Pivotal One.
This is a bold initiative. Born from VMware and EMC just last April, with support from General Electric–the pioneer for today’s Industrial Internet, we already released the first version of this platform last fall. Momentum is building quickly, with loads partners announcing huge plans for Pivotal One that include mobilizing tens of thousands of dedicated professionals across the globe in the next year. By all accounts, the predictions for 2014 is set to be a breakout year for the developer, with Pivotal leading the charge. Even media magnet The Economist is predicting our success, lobbying that in the next 5 years Pivotal should be the CIO’s largest technology supplier, over Google and Apple.
Who better to lead that charge than someone whose been in charge of development at one of the internet giants we are helping customers emulate? How about someone whose also lead R&D at one of history’s largest software employer to date? Hugh E. Williams pedigree contains both, and now he stands to leave an even bigger mark on how software as a whole is moving forward.
Hugh comes to us as a Microsoft and eBay veteran with over 25 years’ experience of building search engines, web services, and data technologies. At eBay, Hugh spent four and a half years creating and managing a large cross-disciplinary team that turned-around the Marketplaces business. His teams efforts were wide-sweeping and fundamentally advanced eBay’s user experiences, search engine, Big Data technologies and platforms. He got that job because before his stint at eBay, he managed an R&D team at Microsoft’s Bing, and spent over 10 years researching and developing search technologies. During his tenure at both companies, he’s become a recognized technologist whose published over 100 works, and earned 19 U.S. patents, with many more pending.
And today, he stands to lead the charge at Pivotal to put all that development leadership and innovation in a box that any developer can open up and use as a springboard to create the world’s next set of apps, including those powering the Industrial Internet.
When asked why he joined Pivotal, not surprisingly Hugh focused on Pivotal’s unique position to be truly transformative for software development, citing,
“We’re at the beginning of a major technology platform shift. Data-driven decisions will fundamentally change business as we know it, and cloud computing is the platform that will enable it. Pivotal is uniquely positioned to pioneer the industry’s first truly “consumer-grade” platform for the enterprise, and I am excited to be part of the team.”
Resources
- Visit the Pivotal Executive Team page
- Visit the Pivotal press center
- Visit Hugh E. Williams’ personal site
