SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 04/09/15 — , home of the leading open source cloud native application platform, today announced that EMC CTO John Roese has been elected Chair by the Foundation–s Board of Directors. Roese will be responsible for providing strategic and operational leadership for the Foundation of which EMC is a founding member.

“John–s progressive views on technology development and strong business acumen will serve the Foundation well,” said Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji. “He leads a talented Board of Directors who are committed to making Cloud Foundry a place of practice for continuous innovation.”

With more than 20 years of executive leadership and technical expertise, Roese brings a rich history of tech innovation and incubation to the Foundation. He has an extensive systems background and technical expertise in a wide range of related disciplines including storage, servers, networking, hardware design, silicon development, software design, systems and applications. Prior to his current position at EMC, Roese led Futurewei, the Silicon Valley advanced development arm of Huawei. He also served as CTO and head of R&D at Nortel, CTO of Broadcom, CTO of Enterasys and CTO of Cabletron Systems.

In addition to his experience in leading large-scale R&D organizations, Roese has been involved in multiple open source initiatives including helping Pingtel open source SipX, an industry-leading unified communications code base. Roese also served on the board of directors of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a global initiative led by Nicholas Negroponte focused on reinventing mobile compute and leveraging open source tools and content to educate millions of children in the developing world. Roese most recently brought EMC fully into the OpenStack effort, including core contributions to Cinder (block storage), work in Swift (object storage) and helping launch the Manila (file storage) efforts.

“It–s an exciting time to be a part of Cloud Foundry,” Roese said. “Cloud Native application infrastructures are taking off and it–s clear that open standards and systems are critical to success. Backed by a strong community of developers and technology leaders, Cloud Foundry is designed to liberate the app developers to obtain true cloud portability and agility. Achieving this goal has significant business implications because organizations want openness, flexibility and choice. By far the strongest effort going on in the industry for this is the work going on with Cloud Foundry and it–s great to see so many industry players behind it.”

In addition to Roese, the Board is comprised of (Platinum and Gold Foundation members) ActiveState President and CEO Bart Copeland; HP Senior Vice President, Helion Product Management Bill Hilf; IBM Distinguished Engineer, CTO Open Cloud Christopher Ferris; Intel SDI Labs Director Nicholas Weaver; Pivotal Executive Vice President Rob Mee; SAP Senior Director, Industry Standards and Open Source Sanjay Patil; Swisscom Head of Application Cloud Marco Hochstrasser; and VMware Vice President of Application Services vCloud Air Ajay Patel.

This news follows a string of recent announcements demonstrating momentum and investments in Cloud Foundry including EMC–s staging of the Foundation–s , new Foundation member and news of a on May 11 and 12. The event will bring together more than 1,500 application developers, IT operations experts, technical managers, business leaders, service providers and project contributors in an independent forum to accelerate and advance the Cloud Foundry open source project and help the community set its agenda for the year. For more information and to register for the Cloud Foundry Summit, please visit: .

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is independent non-profit organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the global industry standard for open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: . To learn more, visit: .

Jil Backstrom
303.913.1650

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