Today’s my last day at Huawei. I’m going to take a couple of weeks off (first in Massachusetts, visiting family and friends, and then in Napa Valley, unwinding), and then on September 13 I’ll be starting at Yahoo! I’ll be working in Shelton Shugar’s Cloud Computing group.
I’m leaving one amazing company to join another. I’ll be traveling a lot less, and I’ll be dealing with a different set of customers, but in each case the vision is the same. It’s about computing as a service, and the operational and business possibilities this this opens up. It’s not defined by technology (despite what you might think if you dropped in on the various online discussion groups about cloud computing). It’s enabled by key technologies (virtualization, data center networking), and it establishes an “innovation vector” for new technologies to enhance and exploit it. I’m not too concerned about whether we label it as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or some other “XaaS“: what’s important is the “aaS“, not the “X“.
Over the last 14 months I’ve enjoyed working with the team at Huawei, in Santa Clara, Shenzhen, and Xi’an. I’m sorry that I’m leaving you all before the first release of the system, but I’m confident that the strategy is solid. It’s gratifying to see how recent events have validated the decisions we made a year ago. And I’m really excited to be joining Yahoo! and working with a company that has such a presence in the industry, and really understands operations at massive scale.