Former VMware CTO Joins CloudFlare as Head of Engineering

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Former VMware chief technology officer Ben Fathi has joined CloudFlare as head of engineering, according to a blog post on Monday.

Fathi left VMware in August after three and a half years with the company. Fathi was one of VMware’s top executives to leave in August; Chuck Hollis, VMware chief strategist of storage and availability, left to join Oracle around the same time.

In a post on CloudFlare’s blog, Fathi describes why he chose to take a role at the company, an announcement which he said may leave some scratching their head since it’s “not even close” to his passion of operating systems.

“We have an opportunity to build a fully distributed and resilient always-on Internet Operating System at the edge of the network — where it matters most — as far as end user experience is concerned,” Fathi said in the blog post. “I’m thrilled to be taking over the helm of engineering at CloudFlare. The question shouldn’t be why I joined, but rather, why you’re not here as well. Come join us and let’s make the Internet a better place together. If we happen to build a scalable secure cloud at the same time, even better. If we manage to build a distributed Internet-scale operating system to manage it all, you might call it serendipity.”

Fathi has more than 30 years of experience in the tech industry, working on UNIX,Linux, Windows, embedded operating systems, and distributed operating systems, according to a report by TechRepublic. At VMware, Fathi ran the core engineering team for vSphere before taking the CTO role.

In the blog post, Fathi also described the interview process and meeting the CloudFlare team, which no doubt has some PR purposes as the company is hiring to keep up with its tremendous growth. Last month, CloudFlare raised $110 million, and announced plans to use the funding to acquire customers, grow product capabilities and rollout expansion into international markets.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/former-vmware-cto-joins-cloudflare-as-head-of-engineering