Benguela is a stealth mode cloud computing company founded by the former Amazon.com executives that initiated and led the development of Amazon’s EC2 service.
Based in Cape Town and Silicon Valley, and backed by Sequoia Capital, Benguela is building software that will revolutionize how enterprises interact with the cloud.
Willem van Biljon and Quinton Hoole of Benguela will present a short overview of the history and current state of Cloud Computing, encompassing both public and private clouds. Against this background we identify the key problems to be solved by Cloud Computing infrastructure around the management of compute, network, and storage resources, especially at large scale.
Willem co-founded Benguela in 2008. Prior to Benguela, Willem was with Amazon.com and built the EC2 business plan and drove product management and marketing for the service.
Before Amazon, Willem was co-founder and joint CEO of Mosaic Software. Mosaic, which was sold to S1 Corp in 2004, became one of the world’s leading EFT companies with operations in more than 30 countries.
Prior to joining Benguela, Quinton was the first techie on the Amazon EC2 team, where he led the technical effort for 5 years as senior engineer.
Prior to that he was involved with a number of high-tech ventures from aircraft avionics to telecommunications systems.
Quinton is passionate about developing world-class technical skills in the Western Cape.”