You may have seen that Dell has hired a cloud evangelist — Barton George. As is often the case in a large organization, I learned about his joining the company on Twitter and on Barton's blog announcing his move. I'm thrilled to have Barton join the Dell team and he's already shown that he is prolific and understands the dynamics of communicating through a blog.
That Dell has hired a Cloud Evangelist — what does this mean? It means we've hired a cloud evangelist. That's all I can say. 🙂
Barton comes to Dell from Austin-based Lombardi Software, where he was responsible for the company's cloud-based offerings. Prior to that, he spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of role ranging from manufacturing operations and marketing in a number of capacities. In his last role there, he was part of the Open Source Group and managed Sun's Linux strategy and relationship with the Linux community.
Barton was one of many Dell colleagues who traveled last week to what was previously known as Linux World and is now a co-mingled mess of OpenSource World, Next Generation Data Center and CloudWorld. I guess the combination of three shows into one makes a little sense but wouldn't you just get rid of all the names and call it something new? I guess that's why I'm not in the events/trade show business.
While he was there he carried around his Flip Mino camera and captured some interviews with some "cloudy" individuals to get their thoughts on the state of the industry.
In his first interview, Barton talks to James Urquhart, who gave a talk at the show on "Virtualization to Cloud." In his second interview, he talks with Brian Aker, lead architect for Drizzle on the use of MySQL for the Web. He's got a slew of other interviews that you'll see next week both on his blog (I've encouraged him to keep his blog alive on WordPress and we'll soon be adding it to our blogroll) but you'll also be able to read his content here on Inside Enterprise IT.
Barton, I look forward to working with you and reading your insights on cloud computing.