Partner Speaker

Paul Strong

Technical Director, Google Cloud

Paul Strong is a Technical Director in the Office of the CTO at Google Cloud. Paul helps connect Google with its enterprise customers, advising them in their digital transformation, in areas ranging from thought leadership, vision and strategy, to application and infrastructure transformation. These relationships also enable Paul to directly connect customers with Google engineering teams, facilitating successful project implementations, as well as bringing customer insight and intimacy into Google to ensure that current and future products continue to delight and enable our customers’ transformation.

Before joining Google Paul was field CTO at VMware, where he drove technology vision, and created and led a field CTO organization, together with a number of programs connecting their R&D organization with their field, customers and partners. These were focused on amplifying and disseminating technology and product vision and strategy, and aggregating and feeding customer and field insight back into engineering to ensure that VMware’s products were constantly improved and relevant. In addition his team focused on new business areas, such as HPC and Telco NFV. He also developed and led VMware’s senior technical leadership career tracks and promotion processes. During his 6.5 year tenure Paul also served as VMware’s CTO for a year, on an interim basis, during which he was also responsible for all of VMware’s innovation programs, and cross BU technology and architectural initiatives.

Prior to VMware, Paul was a Distinguished Research Scientist at eBay for 5 years, where he focused on understanding and automating infrastructure management. Before that he was at Sun Microsystems for 8 years, where he worked on Solaris Containers and N1. Most of his recent career (last 17 years) has been focused on how to hide the complexity inherent in datacenter and cloud infrastructure, to allow it to be trivially, yet securely consumed. Essentially moving us to a world where we focus on managing applications, data and people, rather than servers, storage, networks, PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones. And freeing enterprises to focus on their transformation.

In addition to his day job(s), Paul has also led a number of standards and industry consortia, and acts as a consultant to various bodies, ranging from startups, to $100B businesses, to governments. In his somewhat limited spare time he is overrun by his children, and aspires to be a musician. His band Fractal’s albums can be found on iTunes and Amazon. They play needlessly complicated music.