Clouds Over Washington: The Cloud and How It Can Serve Government

Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.

Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry.

Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

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Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Summit. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of CollabNet and Safari Books Online, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

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Casey Coleman is the Chief Information Officer for the U.S. General Services Administration. As CIO she is responsible for managing the agency’s $550 million IT budget and ensuring alignment with agency and administration strategic objectives, information security and enterprise architecture. During her tenure, Ms. Coleman implemented an agency-wide infrastructure consolidation and standardization program that resulted in significant cost savings and improvements to security and performance. She is active in the Federal IT community and encourages the use of social media to improve service and operations of the Federal government. In addition, Ms. Coleman writes a blog titled Around the Corner at http://innovation.gsa.gov.

Ms. Coleman has served in several other leadership roles at GSA. Prior to coming to GSA she served in consulting, sales and management roles at several technology startups. She began her career at Lockheed Martin Corporation. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M University and a master’s in business administration from the University of Texas at Arlington. She and her husband reside in Vienna, VA.

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