Scott Noteboom, the man who led Yahoo’s data center operations since 2005, has now joined Apple as the iconic consumer electronics maker expands into the cloud. According to LinkedIn, Noteboom is now a “distinguished gentleman” at Apple as of this month after leaving his role as VP of data center engineering and operations at Yahoo.
Noteboom was involved in Yahoo’s chicken coop data centers and helped expand Yahoo’s Internet portal in scale. His bio from a recent data center conference included this bit:
Scott Noteboom serves as Yahoo!’s Head of Global Data Center Infrastructure. Since joining Yahoo! in 2005, he has served as chief design architect and a founder of the company’s data center self construct / operate initiatives. He also managed over 10x growth of the companies data center / compute operating footprint, leading teams that installed and support multi hundred thousand hosts. Scott’s duties include managing all aspects of the data center lifecycle– from design, construction, operations, to de-commissions.
As Apple ramps up its consumer cloud, spending up to $1 billion on a North Carolina data center, it has hired executives from many big-name data center operators including Microsoft’s Kevin Timmons. Update: Looks like Timmons was named the CTO of data center operator CyrusOne this week, and his background didn’t include any mention of Apple. This latest hire just reaffirms Apple’s commitment to the cloud and getting to webscale.