With software taking control of the upper layers of the data center, we profile some of the leaders responsible for the ongoing software transformation.

In the following pages we profile ten of the people that are taking advantage of this data center software explosion, with a short fact-file on each. This is by no means a comprehensive list but it does include many of the players we think are making a difference.

In alphabetical order:

This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Martin Casado, OpenFlow
– DCD

Martin Casado

Notable for: OpenFlow

https://twitter.com/martin_casado 

In 2005 at Stanford, Martin Casado wrote a post-graduate thesis titled The Virtual Network System which kicked off the software defined networking (SDN) revolution. The fundamental idea is to separate the control features of networking from the data, allowing functions to become portable. Casado went on to create one of the defining protocols of SDN, OpenFlow. In 2007 he co-founded the SDN-focused company Nicira Networks, which created proprietary versions of OpenFlow, Open vSwitch and OpenStack, before being sold to VMware in 2012 for $1.26bn.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Amir Chaudhry, Unikernels
– DCD

Amir Chaudhry

Notable for: Unikernels 

https://twitter.com/amirmc 

Amir Chaudhry is one of the founding fathers of unikernels – single-address space machine images that minimize the footprint of cloud services, ensuring fast startup times, lower computing bills and more responsive infrastructure. Chaudhry founded Unikernel Systems and now works at Docker, which acquired his company and set him to work on all things unikernel-related.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Doug Cutting

Doug Cutting, Hadoop
– DCD

Notable for: Hadoop

https://twitter.com/cutting 

An open source icon, Doug Cutting created search indexer Lucene and co-created web crawler Nutch before making the wildly successful Apache Hadoop. Conceived as a way to process large data sets using commodity hardware, Hadoop distributes both processing and data. It has become the world’s leading platform for Big Data analytics and spawned a number of other tools. After working on Hadoop for years at Yahoo!, Cutting became chief architect at Cloudera, a company that provides Hadoop-based software, support and services, which now has more than 2,100 partners.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Azure
– DCD

Notable for: Microsoft Azure

https://twitter.com/scottgu 

Co-inventor of ASP.NET, Scott Guthrie took over Microsoft Azure last year, investing heavily in maintaining the cloud system’s strong market position in a competitive field. Azure now spans 32 ‘regions’ worldwide, with each region composed of multiple data centers. Guthrie has worked hard to attract developers to his platforms and earlier this year wrote code live on stage to appeal to AzureCraft attendees.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Benjamin Hindman

Benjamin Hindman, Mesos
– DCD

Notable for: Mesos

https://twitter.com/benh 

Benjamin Hindman co-created open source cluster manager Apache Mesos while at university in 2009. It has gone on to be used by more than 50 organizations, including Twitter, Airbnb, and Apple, and is seen as a main contender for handling and delivering software defined data centers. Hindman, who worked at Twitter, went on to co-found Mesosphere, where he works on helping enterprise customers make the most of the Mesos manager he created.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Solomon Hykes, Docker
– DCD

Solomon Hykes

Notable for: Docker

https://twitter.com/solomonstre 

Growing up as a coder and running servers as a teenager in France, Solomon Hykes co-founded platform-as-a-service firm dotCloud in 2010. While dotCloud found moderate success, its greatest claim to fame is being the birthplace of an internal open source project that Hykes started, which became Docker – a system for managing applications deployed inside software containers. In 2013, Docker was spun out into its own company, with Hykes as the CTO. Fortune quickly followed as Docker was adopted by many of the biggest companies. It has now gone mainstream and is set to be installed on every HPE server the company produces.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Alex Polvi

Notable for: CoreOS

https://twitter.com/polvi 

When Alex Polvi was 25 he sold his cloud-based server infrastructure monitoring company, Cloudkick, to Rackspace for an estimated $30m. Two years later he was back with something even bigger – an open source lightweight operating system called CoreOS. Developed by a company bearing the same name, CoreOS has quickly achieved success. With Polvi as CEO, it recently announced a partnership with Intel to containerize OpenStack, as well as releasing the prototype version of its new open source distributed storage system, Torus.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Mike Rhodin

Mike Rhodin, IBM Watson
– DCD

Notable for: IBM Watson

https://twitter.com/mikerhodin 

Since its Jeopardy! win in 2011, Watson has remained one of the most exciting AI projects around. Led by Mike Rhodin, Watson has successfully transitioned from a research initiative into two businesses – Watson and Watson Health. In 2014, IBM announced it would invest $1bn in Watson, and in 2016 Watson Health completed its fourth acquisition with the $2.6bn purchase of Truven Health Analytics. Now head of Watson Business Development, Rhodin says he is “developing the next Watson Industry business units as we transform IBM into a cognitive solutions and cloud platform company.”

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Sage Weil

Sage Weil, Ceph
– DCD

Notable for: Ceph

https://twitter.com/liewegas 

Founder and chief architect of distributed storage platform Ceph, Sage Weil has always had a huge influence on the open source scene. Weil worked for two years as founder and CTO at scale-out open source storage systems provider Inktank, which was then bought by Red Hat for $175m.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.

Monty Widenius

Monty Widenius, MySQL
– DCD

Notable for: MySQL, MariaDB

https://twitter.com/montyw 

Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius is the main author of MySQL, the open source relational database management system he released in 1995. Sun Microsystems bought MySQL for $1bn in 2008, providing one of the first great legitimizations for open source in business. In 2010, Sun in its turn was bought by Oracle, and Widenius grew disenchanted with the direction of the product. He built his own fork of MySQL, named MariaDB, which he hopes will ultimately replace his first creation.

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This article appeared in the July/August issue of DatacenterDynamics magazine.