JP Rangaswami Joins Salesforce As Chief Scientist

Salesforce.com today announced that they are appointing JP Rangaswami as the Chief Scientist. We very rarely write about individuals joining companies in this space but I think this news deserves a mention here. I think it is a great move on the Salesforce’s side to bring in a person like JP Rangaswami to evangelize about Cloud Computing and Salesforce. He is one of the well known thought leaders in technology and people listen to him with full attention whenever he speaks about topics like open source, social computing, etc.. With Mr. Benioff’s current focus on Chatter and how it will change the way enterprises work, he is the right person to be in Salesforce.

At salesforce.com, Rangaswami reports to Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. In his new role, Rangaswami will help European customers think about innovative ways to use the real-time, mobile and social capabilities provided by Salesforce apps and the Force.com platform. He also will contribute to salesforce.com’s product strategy as well as promote the benefits of cloud computing globally. He is salesforce.com’s first Chief Scientist.

I have been following Mr. Rangaswami’s blog for many years now and he will be a great asset not just to Salesforce but, also, in promoting the idea of cloud computing, in general. Previously, Mr. Rangaswami was chief scientist at British telecom (BT) and while he was at BT, he has championed for public clouds and articulated his vision very well. As an example, I would love to link to a media coverage of his thoughts on cloud adoption which he presented in a London event earlier this year.

In short, this is a great move for both Salesforce and Cloud industry. I am looking forward to hearing more and more from JP on how we can promote public cloud computing effectively in the coming years. While public cloud providers need to innovate more to fill some of the gaps on the side of security, etc., we need to counter the FUD unleashed by vendors whose business models are threatened by the idea of cloud computing and the associated economics. Folks like JP Rangaswami are clearly well suited to take on the FUD from the frontlines. Good luck to both JP and Salesforce.com.