Yahoo! cloud man rises to CTO

Yahoo! has tapped cloud computing guru Raymie Stata to fill its CTO post.

Stata was formerly Yahoo!'s chief architect, playing an instrumental role in the company's move to a common distributed infrastructure. "As Chief Architect, Raymie led transformative efforts to rewire Yahoo!, moving from a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform infrastructure," the company said in a blog post.

"With his leadership, technical Yahoo’s have focused on core challenges like creating a stable, agile development environment, extracting value from masses of unstructured data, developing scalable global experiences, and architecting a cloud to serve as the foundation for every click across our network."

Some seem to think Yahoo! is no longer a technology company. But this is senseless babbling. Whatever the company is offering netizens, it should go without saying that as the one of the web's largest properties, Yahoo! requires an infrastructure to match — not to mention the tools it offers to third-party developers.

Yahoo! is still the world's largest contributor to Hadoop, the open source distributed number-crunching platform that underpins its infrastructure. Later this month, it will host the third annual Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, California, attracting developers from across the globe.

Over the past year, Yahoo! has open sourced its edge web server, and by early next, it intends to open up its "cloud serving" platform, described as something halfway between Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Google's App Engine. Known simply as "Cloud" inside Yahoo!, the platform provides the company's internal developers with on-demand access to computing resources.

Stata is a five-year veteran of Yahoo!. As chief technology officer, he will "oversee all of Yahoo!'s advanced technologies and drive the technical direction of the company." The promotion takes affect immediately. Former CTO Ari Balogh announced in April that he would leave the company today. ®