Papaioannou headed up strategic direction for Yahoo's cloud-computing and Hadoop teams, helping to define the company's overall IT strategy.
Yahoo lost a key thought leader when vice president and chief cloud
systems architect, Todd Papaioannou, announced his departure from the
company to take a new job as entrepreneur in residence at venture
capital firm Battery Ventures, GigaOm reported Aug. 5.
Battery Ventures, which has offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park,
Calif., in Waltham, Mass., and in Herzliya, Israel, has raised more than
$4 billion in funds since its inception in 1983. The company has backed
such enterprises as Akamai Technologies, Allegiance Telecom, FORE
Systems, HNC Software, Infoseek, MetroPCS, Nextel, Pixelworks, Qtera,
SigmaTel, Vastera and Witness Systems.
Papaioannou (pictured) will work with Battery's investment team "to help them identify
disruptive technologies for the next three to five years ... help
existing Battery portfolio companies build the best scalable enterprise
software ... and develop new ideas for investment," he told GigaOm's
Derrick Harris.
For a little more than one year at Yahoo, Papaioannou headed up
strategic direction for Yahoo's cloud computing and Hadoop teams,
helping to define the company's overall IT strategy.
Papaioannou has a big-data-oriented storage background. Prior to joining
Yahoo, he spent nearly five years in several software architecture jobs
at data warehouser Teradata. Previously, he was an early employee at
startup Greenplum, serving as the chief architect and director of
engineering.
Storage and security systems maker
EMC acquired Greenplum in 2010 to provide its chief big data analytics system.
Papaioannou told GigaOm that he "left Yahoo to pursue my personal
predilections. My background has been in consumer and enterprise
software, but Yahoo was my first gig in internal IT. It was a great
experience, but I wanted to get back into shipping software and
competing in the market against other products."
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
