Sam Johnston is President of the Open Cloud Initiative, a California
non-profit dedicated to promoting the use of open standards in cloud
computing products and services.
Sam currently also the Director, Cloud & IT Services for Equinix in
Europe, where he works on cloud computing strategy, product development
and providing subject matter expertise both internally and externally.
He was previously the technical program manager for Google’s global tape
backup program, where he worked in the Site Reliability Engineering
team in Switzerland and gained deep knowledge of current, former and
future Internet-scale server and storage platforms. Before joining
Google, Sam worked at Citrix Systems and served as founder and CTO for a
number of successful high-tech start-ups in Australia, France and
Ireland. A computer scientist at heart, he was recently listed as one of
the leaders of cloud computing, having been an active contributor to
the cloud computing community since its inception (particularly in the
areas of security, standards and interoperability).
Sam has advised and architected pilots for various European enterprises
(including one of the earliest and largest commercial cloud deployments
to date, started in 2006 with 35,000 users) and presented at a number of
international conferences on the subject.
Sam earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.