Brian Aker Email & Phone Number

Provide technical and business advice.

Greater Seattle Area

As VP of Engineering for HPCloud's PaaS Engineering group I built out teams to deliver Load Balancing, DNS, Messaging, and MySQL as a service. For these services we built out a HA multi-region, multi-AZ, Open Stack based cloud platform. Created a technical team of project managers to oversee this work. I held budget responsibility for this role and was a working member of the management team reporting directly to the GM.I was responsible for the delivery of POC cloud for PaaS and executed on delivering the IAAS for private POC as well.Was principally responsible for the recruiting of key OpenStack engineering talent. Evangelized the advantages of Continuous Integration in order to modernize the approach taken to delivering software. Using CI I showed that it was possible to create a startup mentality and approach that enabled startup sized teams to deliver product inside of HP. I delivered multiple talks and presentations for HP which included several Keynotes for notable conferences like Linuxcon, The OpenStack Summit, and OSCON.Worked with the HP Legal and its Office on Open Source on license and compliancy issues. I co-authored HP's modified blogging policy.Oversaw the build out, which included location selection, budget, and architecture approval, of the Seattle HP Office Site.

Provide advice on MySQL integration.

Help guide strategies to work with Open Source Communities. Provide advice on MySQL Integration.

Greater Seattle Area

Built the startup over a 18 month period. We successfully built products that we released, and eventually sold one of key pieces of IP created.

Coach the development teams on deployment methods.

Lead Web Scaling Technology group. Our group provided leadership on the next generation MySQL Architecture (i.e. Drizzle). We also oversaw the work to provide the Niagra2 architecture with concrete workload usage. This was done by optimizing applications like Memcached. To demonstrate the utility of Sun's cloud we built a distributed search engine during this period.

Advice on deployment and development strategies.

In this role I was responsible for the creation of a world wide engineering organization spanning more then 32 countries. I formalized six product lines and oversaw the introduction of QA, Release, and CI organizational functions. The organization's engineering directors reported directly to me and along with it project management. Much of the team I created still existed at Oracle a number of years after the eventual acquisition of MySQL by Oracle.Among my responsibilities was the responsibility for the flagship product, MySQL. During this period I had direct responsibilities for acquisitions that were made. I directly oversaw and negotiated the acquisition of two companies and planned out the product roadmap for a third that then allowed MySQL to compete against Oracle in the telecom business. When MySQL lost the main partner for its transaction engine, I oversaw the planning which allowed us to identify potential partners and acquisition targets.During this period I shipped more the dozen major releases and brought a number of other products to GA. During this time I also did work as an individual contributor to the MySQL database. This work spans the creation of a number of storage engine and includes the revolutionary concept "the loadable RDBMS storage engine." This innovation sparked an entire business model which lead to revenue in the tens of millions of dollars within the first year of its release.When we turned out attention to IPO I pivoted to the position of "Senior Director of Technology", where I worked with sales on some the largest accounts MySQL acquired. I partnered with sales in order to help us land several deals in the seven digit range. Some of these deals involved partnering with companies like IBM and HP who competed in our market. During this period I joined the APAC management team where I helped launch MySQL KK. MySQL's APAC group broke every preconceived notion about sales in APAC by surpassing sales quota every quarter.

Was responsible for the first major rewrite of Slashdot's database backend and restructured entire code base in order to make it scale. Rewrote the DB layer for better scaling, and integrated Slashdot's backend deeply into the Apache web server. Oversaw development efforts on additional OSDN websites.

Tangent Software specialized in four areas over its lifetime and was anywhere from 1 to four employees. Its speciality was in doing custom designed software for small companies who needed turn key solutions. These included the design and coding of software for banking machines, GIS problems, and web consulting. Plus we consulted on network and UNIX system deployments.

Oversaw architecture changes, redesigns of websites and IVR infrastructure. Managed IT group during critical transition point for company.

Oversaw redesign and deployment of the Virtual Hospital one of the Internet's first online resource sites for medical information. Helped write grants, manage infrastructure, and write software for the staging of lung cancer and asthma. Designed search engine for medial data. Designed replication system for transporting Naval medical texts. Oversaw the purchase and choice for hardware to use in distributed designs.

Wrote software for scale models, 3D wireframe models, and designed statistical software for determining rain data for a distributed computing framework.

Maintained Vax Lab and oversaw student workers. Designed campus backbone, and oversaw transition from VMS based infrastructure to a Sun/UNIX environment.

Doctor Of Philosophy, Computational Geoscience

Bachelor Of Science, Math, Computer Science, Environmental Science

Bachelor Of Science, History, Geology

Majored in History of Science (completed thesis), Minor in Women Studies. Graphic Artist and Layout Manager for two years at the Kentucky.