| Dr. Werner Vogels | |
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Werner Vogels - Dutch Digital Pioneer Collection |
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| Born | October 3, 1958 Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
| Occupation | VP and CTO of Amazon.com |
Dr. Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com in Seattle, Washington. In charge of driving technology innovation within the company, Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities. He is the only executive apart from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos to speak publicly on behalf of Amazon.com. He joined Amazon in September 2004 as the Director of Systems Research. He was named Chief Technology Officer in January 2005 and Vice President, World-wide Architecture in March of that year.
Prior to joining Amazon.com, from 1994 until 2004, Dr. Vogels was a research scientist at the Computer Science Department of Cornell University. He mainly conducted research in scalable reliable enterprise systems. From 1999 through 2002 he also held a Vice President and Chief Technology position at Reliable Network Solutions, Inc. From 1991 through 1994 he was a senior researcher at INESC in Lisbon, Portugal. Vogels received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands with Prof. Henri Bal and Prof. Andy Tanenbaum as his advisors.[1] He is the author of many conference and journal articles, mainly on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing systems.
Vogels maintains a technology oriented weblog named “All Things Distributed” which he started in 2001 while he was still a scientist at Cornell.[2] It was mainly used to discuss early results of his research. After he joined Amazon.com the nature of the weblog changed to more product oriented with some general technology and industry writings.
Vogels described the deep technical nature of Amazon's infrastructure work in a paper about Amazon's Dynamo, the storage engine for the Amazon Shopping Cart.[3] He is in general regarded as one of the world's top experts on ultra-scalable systems and he uses his weblog to educate the community about issues such as eventual consistency.
During 2008 it became evident that Vogels was one of the architects behind Amazon’s approach to Cloud Computing, the Amazon Web Services (AWS). During that year Vogels was continuously on the road to promote Cloud Computing and AWS and its benefits to the industry. Information Week recognized Vogels for this educational and promotional role in Cloud Computing with the 2008 CIO/CTO of the Year award.[4] In an accompanying interview with Vogels provides some details of the history of his work at Amazon.[5]
Other awards include the 2009 Media Momentum Personality of the Year Award.[6] In 2010 readers of ReadWriteWeb voted on the "Cloud's Most Influential Executive" and selected Vogels with a double digit margin.[7]
Vogels is married to Annet Vogels, a former musician with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. They have two daughters, Laura Vogels and Kim Vogels, who both studied Drama and Theater Arts in London, UK and moved to New York City after completing their studies.
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