Amazon Recruits Tech Guru Vass to Drive Cloud Performance

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added technology industry veteran Bill Vass to its roster of senior management. Vass, who was most recently CEO of Liquid Robotics and is being hailed as a robotics pioneer, has a long history in the technology world, and now it looks as though he’ll be tasked with improving the performance of the Amazon infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.

Vass himself broke the news of his new role on his LinkedIn profile. Starting this month, Vass is vice president of Engineering at Amazon Web Services, although he did not provide details on what responsibilities his new job would entail.

As a longtime player in the technology space, Vass has more than 34 years of experience in a variety of roles that include just about every C-level position you can come up with. Vass left Liquid Robotics in June. While there, he served as the company’s president and CEO.

Prior to that, Vass had a long history of working with top-tier vendors and federal government departments and agencies, including Sun Microsystems, NASA, the Pentagon and the U.S. Army Personnel Information Systems Command.

The addition of Vass should be interesting. Not only has Amazon brought on a longtime heavy-hitter, but Vass’ experience in the robotics field could also come in handy. After all, Amazon has been dipping its toe into the robotics industry, in part through its acquisition of Kiva Systems and also through its recent and future work in drone-based package delivery.

But what could this mean specifically for Amazon’s IaaS public cloud? Good things are likely. Vass has the technical knowledge to work with Amazon’s existing engineering team to make improvements. The speculation so far is that he will be aiming to improve the performance of the Amazon cloud.