Werner Vogels, Vice President & CTO at Amazon.com, is responsible for driving the company's technology vision.

Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry.

Werner holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing. He was named the 2008 CTO of the Year by Information Week for his contributions to making Cloud Computing a reality. For his unique style in engaging customers, media and the general public, he received the 2009 Media Momentum Personality of Award.