Pivotal Grabs Puppet Labs Co-founder Andrew Clay Shafer as Director of Technology

Andrew Clay Shafer, a familiar face in the DevOps community and one of the co-founders of the IT automation startup Puppet Labs, has taken a senior technologist role at Pivotal, the EMC and VMware company led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

Shafer joins Pivotal as senior director of technology, reporting directly to president and head of product Scott Yara. Yara was a co-founder of Greenplum, a data analytics technology firm EMC bought in 2010 and made part of Pivotal along with other past acquisitions.

Shafer is the latest addition to the star-studded management team at Pivotal, which aims to sell enterprises the technology and the mindset necessary for building and deploying modern software applications at the same pace Internet giants, such as Google and Facebook, build and deploy them.

In a Q&A published on Pivotal’s blog announcing his appointment, Shafer said his initial focus will be on growing the Cloud Foundry community. Cloud Foundry is Pivotal’s open source Platform-as-a-Service technology.

“For the moment, Scott asked me to focus on fostering a vibrant technical community around Cloud Foundry and look for ways to help align Pivotal’s products strategically with the opportunities in a market being transformed by cloud computing, open source, agile, DevOps and data,” he said.

Cloud Foundry is part of Pivotal’s varied portfolio of products and services and something Shafer has been involved in in the past. “I see Cloud Foundry as an empowering technology that allows operations to declaratively manage distributed services as a top-level abstraction while ensuring consistent application of policies and self-service to the frontline developers,” he said.

Shafer acted as an MC at the Cloud Foundry Summit this past June in San Francisco.

After he left Puppet, the successful DevOps-style IT automation company, he went on to work as VP of engineering at Cloudscaling, helping companies build and operate OpenStack and CloudStack infrastructure. He also did a “short tour of duty” as a cloud builder at Rackspace, a service provider deeply invested in OpenStack.