Werner Hans Peter Vogels is the chief technology officer and Vice President of
Amazon.com in charge of driving technology innovation within the
company. Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities.
Education Vogels received a Ph.D. in computer
science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands supervised by
Henri Bal and Andy Tanenbaum. Career
From 1991 through 1994, he was a senior researcher at INESC in Porto, Portugal.
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. He is the author of many conference and
journal articles, mainly on distributed systems technologies for enterprise
computing systems. He co-founded a company with Kenneth
Birman and Robbert van Renesse in 1997 called Reliable Network Solutions, Inc.
The company possessed US patents on computer network resource monitoring and
multicast protocols. From 1999 through 2002, he held vice president and chief
technology officer positions with the company.
He joined Amazon in September 2004 as the director of systems research. He was
named chief technology officer in January 2005 and vice president in March
of that year. Vogels maintains a blog focusing on
"building scalable and robust distributed systems", which he started
in 2001 while a scientist at Cornell. It was first used to discuss early results
of his research. After he joined Amazon.com, the nature of the weblog
changed to be 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. He is generally 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.
In 2008, it became evident that Vogels was one of the architects behind
Amazon's approach to cloud computing, the Amazon Web Services. During that
year Vogels was continuously on the road to promote cloud computing and AWS and
its benefits to the industry. Awards
Information Week recognized Vogels for educational and promotional role in
cloud computing with the 2008 CIO/CTO of the Year award. In an accompanying
interview Vogels provides some details of the history of his work at Amazon.
Other awards include the 2009 Media Momentum Personality of the Year Award.
In 2010 readers of ReadWriteWeb voted on the "Cloud's Most Influential Executive"
and selected Vogels with a double digit margin.
Dr. Vogels was named a TechTarget Top 10 Cloud Computing Leader in 2010, 2011,
and 2012, and led the 2012 list of Wired's Top 10 Cloud Influencers and
Thought Leaders. On June 20, 2014, Dr. Vogels received
the inaugural Holland on the Hill Heineken Award for "Substantial
contributions to the US-Dutch economic relationship, a commitment to innovation
and support for entrepreneurs". As part of the award Dr. Vogels delivered a
lecture "Amazon Innovation - Enabling Everyone to Pursue their Dreams" in the
Caucus Room of the Cannon House Office Building.
In 2014 ExecRank ranked Dr. Vogels as the #1 Chief Technology Officer.
Private life 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.
References External links
A podcast interview with Vogels on architecture and distributed systems,
Software Engineering Radio, Episode 40, Dec 2006.