Last week, Microsoft added another powerhouse employee to its ever-evolving roster. James Staten, an industry veteran who monitored the cloud computing market for Forrester Research will now join Microsoft as chief strategist for its Cloud & Enterprise team. Staten will help Microsoft expand and connect its cloud computing services with other Microsoft products and services. Staten previously worked with other tech companies in the past, including Azul Systems and Sun Microsystems. He served as director of marketing at Sun Microsystems from 2001 to 2004.
Staten will work directly under Scott Guthrie, the vice president of the Cloud & Enterprise team. In Staten’s new role, he will bring a fresh perspective to Microsoft, in line with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s focus of expanding Microsoft products and services across platforms and even partnering with business rivals to further expand the reach of Microsoft products and services. Staten will make the key decision of what companies should move to cloud computing and which should not, which is contrary to what other cloud computing companies like Amazon and Google are doing.
“You don’t make a binary decision. You figure out which parts of your architecture are best suited to the cloud and take the most advantage of the cloud economics, and you start there.”
Staten started his career as a journalist before getting an analyst job with Gartner in 1996. Staten has been with Forrester Research as their principal analyst and vice president since 2007. It’s good to see Microsoft is doing things differently than its competitors to broaden its reach in cloud computing and into other products and services.
