Apple Inc. has reportedly snagged one of the top data center experts on the planet, and the company did its recruiting in Redmond. Data Center Knowledge reported that Apple recruited one Kevin Timmons, former general manager of Datacenter Services from Microsoft. The site confirmed with Microsoft that the executive has left, but only unnamed industry sources would say that he has left for the sunnier confines of Cupertino.
“Kevin Timmons, general manager of Datacenter Services, has decided to pursue other career opportunities and is no longer working at Microsoft,” Dayne Sampson, CVP of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft, said in a statement. “We appreciate the contributions he made to Microsoft during his time here.”
Mr. Timmons will reportedly not be filling Apple’s top data center executive position, at least according to unnamed sources who spoke with Dave Ohara. Mr. Ohara said that while that top spot was left vacant by the untimely death of Olivier Sanche in late 2010, it has since been filled, and no one seems to yet know what Mr. Timmons’s title and responsibilities will be.
Some smart conjecture, however, looks first to his known skill set, which is building data centers, as opposed to necessarily running them. This suggests that Mr. Timmons will be doing something similar at Apple, which ties in nicely with a recent analyst report that said Apple was in the process of building many data centers in the U.S. and Europe that are similar to its new digs in North Carolina.
For those looking to spice up this story, there’s also Apple’s new job posting that talks about a “small team” of engineers that will be, “writing the software [that] forms the foundation for some of our most exciting new products and services.”
It doesn’t take an HP-15C to make all that add up to Apple being very serious about its future in cloud services.
1 + 1 = ?