15 Cloud Influencers You NEED To Be Following

Vanessa Alvarez

Vanessa is driven by emerging technologies that solve hard problems and make everyday life easier. Vanessa believes that its important to do what you love, stay hungry and take risks. Vanessa gets excited that she gets to still learn something new every day.

Vanessa’s path has taken her from research to execution, with everything in between. She has worked with some of the most brilliant minds at companies such as Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, and Forrester, as well as emerging startups in Silicon Valley. Vanessa thrives on bringing emerging technologies to market and changing the status quo.

Vanessa notes that “the impact that technologies have today, at a pace unlike anything we have seen, is fascinating and being a part of making that happen is what I’m passionate about.” You may have seen Vanessa before as she has been featured in places such as Forbes-women in tech series.

You can follow Vanessa on the following channels:

Twitter: @vanessaalvarez1
Clubhouse: @vanessaalvarez1
LinkedIn: Vanessa Alvarez

Jeff Barr

Jeff has been working in the software industry since 1976 when he started working part-time at a computer store while still in high school. Since then Jeff has worked at a variety of large and small organizations, served as VP of Engineering for a startup, worked at Microsoft and Amazon, and worked on his own.

As the Chief Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff gets to tell the AWS story to audiences all over the world. Jeff says that he talks, blogs, records videos, and spreads the word via social media.

Jeff highlights that he is a strong believer in continuing education and recently earned his Master’s Degree in Communication and Digital Media from the University of Washington.

You can follow Jeff on the following channels:

Twitter: @jeffbarr
LinkedIn: Jeff Barr
Website: jeff-barr.com

Evan Kirstel

Evan is a B2B thought leader and top technology influencer with an aggregate social media audience of 470,000 people (350K Twitter, 54K LinkedIn and 70K Instagram followers, 3K Clubhouse).

Evan has successfully built an organic reach in the tens of millions, within 10 years.

Evan was named 4th Most Engaging Digital Marketer by Brand24.

B2B tech brands like Intel, 3M, AT&T Business, Qualcomm, HPE, Telefonica, Samsung, Citrix and Ericsson hire Evan to help them to achieve massive visibility and scale, leveraging the power of social media in a variety of market segments including mobile, blockchain, cloud, 5G, HealthTech, IoT, AI, Digital Health, crypto, AR, VR, Big Data, Analytics and CyberSecurity.

With 30 years of enterprise sales, alliances & biz dev experience in the telecom and IT arena, Evan brings a unique perspective on opportunities in the Unified Communications & Collaboration space, including extensive practical knowledge of mobile, voice/video/web collaboration and cloud technology. Evan understands emerging cloud & mobile technology and market convergence dynamics with a strong track record in selling and marketing disruptive technology to enterprise and service providers.

Co-Founder of EvIRA Health, a close-knit network of fellow B2B thought leaders and digital social practitioners tirelessly serving the global health tech community.

You can follow Evan on the following channels:

Twitter: @evankirstel
Instagram: evankirstel
Clubhouse: @EvanKirstel
LinkedIn: Evan Kirstel
Website: www.evankirstel.com

Helen Yu

Helen believes growth thrives at the intersection of #tech and #humanity. As a technology leader, Helen enables global players to scale through a people-first framework. Helen is a Global Top 20 thought leader in 10 categories, including cloud computing.

Helen is passionate about the voice of the customer to deliver game-changing digital transformations. As a customer success executive, $100M plus P&L owner, board member, and advisor, Helen drives profitable growth for global players in the tech, eCommerce, telecom, manufacturing, insurance, FinTech and healthcare markets. The results have led to multibillion-dollar revenue growth for private, early-stage startup, pre-IPO and Fortune 500 enterprises. Highlighted achievements by Helen include:

• At Marketo, professional service revenue grew from 500K to 14M and ARR from 5M to 155M within 3.5 years.
• At Adobe, Helen drove revenue from $15M to $65M within 2.5 years.
• At Oracle, Helen contributed to over $50M in license sales in one year, and grew the licensing pipeline by over 30% with 20% YoY growth.
• As an Advisor to Jebbit (named in the Top 25 Most Promising Companies in the World by CNBC), it doubled 2018 revenue over the prior two years combined.
• As an advisor to conversational AI innovator Pypestream, it has achieved 60% YoY growth during the pandemic.
• Helen served on the transition team for Marketo’s $1.8B M&A deal, regularly contributing to board meetings.
• Helen prepared materials for and attended both public and private board meetings, including at Marketo and Showpad.

Competitive by nature (ask her about trekking up Mt. Everest Base Camp), Helen started Tigon Advisory, a CXO-as-a-Service growth accelerator in 2017 to multiply growth opportunities for organizations. Customers include Cisco, Qualcomm, AT&T, IBM, Vodafone and others with focus areas on deep customer insights for a profound customer experience, go-to-market expansion, digital transformation strategy, cybersecurity strategy, and influencer marketing.

You can follow Helen on the following channels:

Twitter: @yuhelenyu
LinkedIn: Helen Yu
Book: Ascend Your Start-Up: Conquer the 5 Disconnects to Accelerate Growth

Mark Weaver

Mark is a top ranked certified AWS Solutions Architect specializing in business, application and data center migrations to the AWS cloud. Mark has a focus on creating secure, highly available, and cost efficient environments in the AWS cloud that meet all modern compliance standards including HIPAA, PCI, and SOC2.

Mark is an AWS instructor and SME for Simplilearn, an online IT training and certification site. Additionally, Mark is an instructor for A Cloud Guru, a world leader in cloud computing training.

Mark has been ranked a top influencer in cloud computing by Whiz Labs, Simplilearn, and now The AI Journal.

Prior to starting databasable, Mark had 15 years of experience doing in-house IT consulting for large investment banks in New York, London and Sydney.

Mark’s specialties include:

– All things AWS
– Cloud migrations
– Cloud architecture
– Cloud cost optimization
– IaaS/PaaS/SaaS
– Disaster recovery
– Storage solutions
– Databases

You can follow Mark on the following channels:

LinkedIn: Mark Weaver
Website: databasable

Duncan Epping

Duncan Epping is VMware’s Senior Director and Chief Technologist in EMEA for the Cloud Platform Business Unit with a primary focus on hyper-converged infrastructure and disaster recovery. In that role, he serves as a partner and trusted adviser to VMware’s customers and partners. Main responsibilities are ensuring VMware’s cloud platform innovations align with essential customer needs and translating customer problems into opportunities. Duncan is a recognized leader in the technical community and considered one of the top 50 most influential leaders globally on the subject of Storage & Availability, Virtualization, and Cloud. He has 7 patents granted and 10+ patents pending on the topic of availability, storage, and resource management.

Duncan was amongst the first VMware Certified Design Expert’s (VCDX007) and the main author and owner of VMware/Virtualization blog Yellow-Bricks.com, which is one of the leading virtualization / hyper-converged / SDDC blogs. Duncan is a regular keynote speaker at industry events and VMware User Group Conferences globally. Duncan has presented at every VMworld in the US and Europe since 2009.

He is the author of :
– vSAN Deep Dive (2019)
– vSphere Clustering Deep Dive (2018)
– Essential Virtual SAN (second edition) (2016)
– vSphere HA Deepdive (Gitbook) (2016)
– Essential Virtual SAN (2014)
– vSphere 5.1 Clustering Technical Deepdive (2012)
– vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive (2011)
– VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive (2010)
– vSphere Quick Start Guide (2009)
– Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4 (2010)
– Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director (2011)

You can follow Duncan on the following channels:

Twitter: @DuncanYB
LinkedIn: Duncan Epping
Website: yellow-bricks.com

Kevin L. Jackson

Kevin L. Jackson is an American business executive and writer. He served in the US Navy for fifteen years, before becoming a senior business executive in the computer industry. Jackson is currently the CEO & Founder, GovCloud Network, a consultancy formed to assist agencies and businesses leverage the parallel and global nature of cloud computing.

Between 1996 and 1999 Jackson served as Chief Technology Officer of Sentel Corporation, which was the winner of the NASA Small Business Innovative Research program under his direction. In 1997 Jackson attended the first annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers on behalf of the company and was featured in the New York Times‘ coverage of the event. In January 1999 Jackson wrote in Speech Technology Magazine: “For the first time in the nearly 40–year history of “wearable” computers, reality can meet society’s expectations … an ideal wearable computer would not only provide a seamless interface for aural and visual communication, but also remain accessible to the user’s mouth, ears, and eyes throughout the range of daily activities.” After leaving Sentel, Jackson worked as a senior executive in the private sector, including for companies like IBM and JP Morgan Chase. He also served as a vice president for Dataline LLC. In February 2010 Jackson became the General Manager of Cloud Computing Services for NJVC. That year Jackson was named a “Cyber Security Visionary” by US Black Engineer & IT magazine.

In 1995-96 Jackson co-produced the interactive CD-ROM Black Wings – A Chronicle of African Americans in Aviation, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution. The CD covers the contributions that African-Americans have made to aviation in America, with narration from Montel Williams.^[6] Since 2008 Jackson has run a cloud-computing blog entitled Cloud Musings by Kevin Jackson.^[7] In 2011 the Cloud Computing Journal named Jackson’s blog one of the top 100 blogs on cloud computing in the United States.^[8] Since March 2011 Jackson has also written the Cloud Musing on Forbes blog for Forbes Magazine, covering the growing use of cloud computing in both the public and private sectors.^[1][9]

In 2011 Jackson co-authored the government training book GovCloud: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Service with Don Philpott. In 2012 Jackson released the book’s follow-up GovCloud II: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Service. He then appeared as an author on Kansas City’s NPR on November 25, 2012, where he discussed the government mandates to move the US Federal government to a cloud-based network. Jackson had been previously interviewed by the national NPR regarding the Federal government’s push for cloud-computing, including in December 2008 when the incoming US President Barack Obama made the decision to convert the White House‘s computer system cloud–computing.

Jackson has been globally recognized as a cloud computing expert, Dell “PowerMore” Thought Leader and Founder/Author of the award winning “Cloud Musings” blog. Jackson has also been recognized as a “Top 100 Cybersecurity Influencer and Brand” by Onalytica (2015), a Huffington Post “Top 100 Cloud Computing Experts on Twitter” (2013), a “Top 50 Cloud Computing Blogger for IT Integrators” by CRN (2015) and a “Top 5 Must Read Cloud Blog” by BMC Software (2015).^[18] His next publication, “Practical Cloud Security: A Cross Industry View”,^[19] will be released by Taylor & Francis in the spring of 2016.

You can follow Kevin on the following channels:

Twitter: @kevin_jackson
LinkedIn: Kevin Jackson

Lydia Leong

Lydia lives at the intersection of business and technology — understanding and articulating the links between business strategy and information technology. Lydia spent the early part of her career deeply hands-on with bleeding-edge technology, although Lydia also did a stint in product marketing, where she learned how to run a P&L and deal with the entire lifecycle of a product/service, giving me an understanding of markets, business drivers, and strategy.

I’m an analyst at Gartner, where Lydia is a cloud computing expert. Lydia has a background in the Internet and telecommunications industry, including Web hosting, Internet services, and global-scale data center operations and engineering, including DevOps.

Lydia is a voracious seeker of input — information, opinions, and experiences — and usually somewhat encyclopedic about her passions, whether work or hobbies. Helen loves talking to brilliant people and others with out-of-the-box, disruptive ideas. Helen is a strategic and creative thinker but also has the ability to map a path of evolution from the present to the future, that is grounded in achievable reality.

You can follow Lydia on the following channels:

Twitter: @cloudpundit
LinkedIn: Lydia Leong

Ian Moyse

Ian is an energetic, conscientious, ambitious Sales Leader in the Cloud industry. Ian enjoys and is experienced at keynote speaking.

Ian has guest blogged & social influenced for Oracle, SAP, SAGE, HP, IBM, Huawei, Commvault, Equinix, Cloudtech, Maximiser, and Miller Heiman. Ian is experienced in cloud & software sales/marketing with a successful track record of rapidly scaling businesses sales, creating & managing high performing sales teams, and opening new markets. Ian has a proven leadership of enthusiastic/committed teams. Ian has experience in a wide range of sales disciplines – building direct, indirect and inside sales teams across UK, EMEA & USA. Ian possess a deep knowledge of indirect channel sales having created strong tier 1, tier 2, OEM and Alliances revenue-generating eco-systems. Ian has 10+ years of experience in leading dIrect selling teams. Ian has led small start-up teams through to pan EMEA large sales teams in global vendors.

Ian has recognitions that include:
– UK Sales Director Of Year (BESMA Awards)
– Top 50 Keynote Speaker for 2019 & 2020
– 2014 Ranked 9th w/wide top 50 most influential in Sales Lead Management (SLMA)
– #1 rated Social Influencer Cloud 2015-2017, #1 ITSM, #18 IOT. #48 Data Security by Onalytica
– Klout Social Score of 80 (2018)
– MSP Mentor Top 250 Worldwide 2011 & 2014
– Top 25 Worldwide SMB Nation 150 Channel Influencers 2012 & 2013

You can follow Ian on the following channels:

Twitter: @imoyse
LinkedIn: Ian Moyse
YouTube: Ian Moyse
Website: Cloud Matters

David Skok

David is a 5-time serial entrepreneur turned VC. David is best known for his blog, www.forEntrepreneurs.com, which covers topics such as the SaaS business model and Metrics, 9 steps to get to repeatable, scalable, and profitable growth, Time to Wow!, how to design and build a sales & marketing growth machine, etc. The blog has been rated #1 website for entrerpreneurs by Inc. magazine and #2 by Forbes.

David founded a total of four companies and did one turn-around. In 2001, he joined Matrix Partners, who had backed his last two startups, as a VC investor. Successful exits as a VC include HubSpot, JBoss, AppIQ, Tabblo, Netezza, Diligent Technologies, CloudSwitch, TribeHR, GrabCAD, OpenSpan, Enservio and Conductor. David currently serves on the boards of Atomist, Apollo GraphQL, CloudBees, Digium, Namely, Salsify, and Zaius.

He holds a B.Sc Honors Degree in Computer Science from the University of Sussex, England.

In addition to his broad focus on enterprise software, David has specific focus on the areas of SaaS, Infrastructure, Dev and DevOps, and Open Source software.

You can follow David on the following channels:

Twitter: @BostonVC
LinkedIn: David Skok
Website: for Entrepreneurs

Tamara McCleary

Currently Tamara is a full-time graduate student at Harvard pursuing dual graduate degrees. As a research scientist, Tamara’s studies at the Harvard Kennedy School entail a scholarly focus on science, technology, ethics, global economics and public good.

Tamara is interested in algorithmic governance, as well as the social, moral, ethical, and spiritual implications of genetic engineering. At the Harvard Divinity School, Tamara is exploring existential topics, apocalyptic literature, and the future of Religion and God in a world of life extension technologies, synthetic life, artificial general intelligence, and our dependence upon machines creating a transhumanist and posthumanist existence.

In addition to her scholarly pursuits, Tamara is an advisor and crew member for the Proudly Human Off-World Projects as well as the founder and CEO of Thulium.

Tamara has spoken at SXSW, Techmanch, QSP Summit, digitalage18 Summit, Business Marketing Associations B2B Masters of Marketing Conference, IBM, and many more.

You can follow Tamara on the following channels:

Twitter: @TamaraMcCleary
LinkedIn: Tamara McCleary

Bernard Golden

Bernard is privileged to serve as head of cloud strategy for Capital One. The company’s motto is “Changing Banking for Good,” and it sees itself as addressing both interpretations of the saying. Fortune has named Capital One “One of the 100 Best Places to Work” 12 years running, and Bernard loves participating in its transformation to a technology company.

Bernard has worked in cloud computing for over a decade and was honored when Wired.com named him one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing. Bernard served as Cloud Computing Advisor for CIO Magazine for five years, where his blog was listed in over a dozen “best of” lists. Bernard is author/co-author of five books, including Amazon Web Services for Dummies, the best selling cloud computing book ever.

Bernard began his career as a software engineer and rose to serve as vice president of engineering at several startups. While writing Virtualization for Dummies a decade ago, Bernard learned about a new technology called cloud computing and immediately recognized what it represented: an innovation platform that would change information technology forever. Bernard began consulting on cloud computing and worked with enterprises and service providers throughout the world.

From 2012 to 2015 Bernard served as an executive at two cloud computing software startups: Enstratius (acquired by Dell, 2013) and ActiveState Software (cloud product line acquired by HPE, 2015).

You can follow Bernard on the following channels:

Twitter: @bernardgolden
LinkedIn: Bernard Golden
Website: bernardgolden.com

Lori MacVittie

Lori MacVittie is the principal technical evangelist for cloud computing, cloud and application security, and application delivery and is responsible for education and evangelism across F5’s entire product suite.

Lori has extensive development and technical architecture experience in both high-tech and enterprise organizations. Prior to joining F5, Lori was an award-winning Senior Technology Editor at Network Computing Magazine, where she authored articles on a variety of topics aimed at IT professionals.

Lori holds a B.S. in Information and Computing Science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University. Lori also serves on the Board of Regents for the DevOps Institute and CloudNOW and has been named one of the top influential women in DevOps.

Lori has written for ZDNet, DARKReading, DevOps.com, and Network Computing.

You can follow Lori on the following channels:

Twitter: @lmacvittie
LinkedIn: Lori MacVittie

Werner Vogels

Werner is an engineer, architect, scientist, programmer, troublemaker, executive, revisionist, investor, mentor, advisor, analyst, academic, sales guy, entrepreneur, data analyst, system administrator, product owner, evangelist, debater, father, musician, and biker.

Werner is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon where he is responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision.

As one of the forces behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations.

Werner joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher. He has held technology leadership positions in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Werner holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Werner likes building things that need to get big. Whether that is technology or a business, Werner is interested in how to scale them.

Werner believes in democratising business creation, simplifying operation and driving innovation by providing a low-cost, scalable and reliable infrastructure that can be acquired on-demand with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and that is available to everyone. Werner is proud to be involved with Amazon Web Services and that he is part of a team that have been able to help young businesses around the globe get off the ground and are helping large enterprises break free from the lock-in of traditional enterprise hardware and software vendors.

You can follow Werner on the following channels:

Twitter: @werner
LinkedIn: Werner Vogels
Website: bernardgolden.com

Randy Bias

Randy Bias is a recognized influencer in cloud computing. An entrepreneur, writer, speaker and futurist, Randy accurately predicted the geometric growth rate of AWS. He is an advocate for open source technology as a foundational business model element in companies traditionally tied to proprietary models. Notably, Randy has initiated and led successful open sourcing efforts for several traditional ISVs. He was declared a top 10 cloud pioneer by InformationWeek & Digital Influencer by Forbes.

Randy was among the first to articulate the technological and cultural drivers that defined the success of hyperscale cloud as a segment of the global IT spend. He correctly identified the 30-year megatrend shifts from mainframe to client/server to cloud, and in the process popularized the pets vs. cattle meme as a construct for describing the fundamental difference between how enterprise stacks and cloud stacks are managed. In the process, he coined “cloud scale” or “cloudscaling” as a descriptor for how cloud stacks differ.

A pioneer and early, vocal advocate for the OpenStack project, Randy identified the devops and agile development movements as fundamental disruption forces that redefined the roles and relevant skill sets in enterprise IT leadership. Randy’s advocacy and public speaking have resulted in over 300,000 views and 5,000 downloads of his cloud and IT presentations on slideshare.

He led teams that achieved numerous cloud firsts, including the first public cloud in Korea, the first global carrier NFV cloud for AT&T, and the first “cattle cloud” for a Fortune 5 company (Walmart). Randy led the charge as change agent and expert disruptor within EMC, beginning with open sourcing of products, followed by the launch of the first mass-production OpenStack-powered appliance. He founded Cloudscaling, acquired by EMC in 2014.

At Juniper, he transformed their Contrail/OpenContrail initiative by rebooting and reinvigorating its open source community.  This included rebranding of the open source project, induction into the Linux Foundation, and driving changes to processes, procedures, documentation, test/dev environments, and architecture.  In addition to this, Randy owned all open source strategy across Juniper while also running a strategic R&D team focused on developing open source contributions and elevating the visibility of Juniper Networks as an open source player.

You can follow Randy on the following channels:

Twitter: @randybias
LinkedIn: Randy Bias