Sam Pullara

Current

Chief Technologist at Yahoo, Inc.
Advisor at Nexenta Systems
Technical Advisor at Terracotta Inc.

5 more...

Past

VP Platforms at Yahoo!
VP Platforms at Yahoo!
VP of Technology Strategy at Yahoo, Inc.

9 more...

Education

Northwestern University
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Sam Pullara’s Summary

My current role is within the product strategy group, acting as chief technologist of Yahoo!. I'm responsible for ensuring the products we develop are competitive and provide compelling customer experiences by driving a dialogue between internal products groups, research and business leaders. I am also responsible for technical evaluations, both internal and external, to drive improvements into our products. In addition I will work closely with our M&A team, champion new technology initiatives, and evangelize Yahoo! technology both inside and outside of Yahoo!. As a representative of Yahoo! I am also am a board member of the OpenSocial Foundation founded by Yahoo!, Google and MySpace.

During the 2H08 I was head of the Yahoo! Open Application Platform, the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes. My primary responsibility was to launch those products in Q4 with the right features and quality. At the beginning of 2008 I joined the platform group and focus primarily on grid computing (e.g. Hadoop), virtualization, large scale reliable data systems, and the implementation of Yahoo's open platform strategy (YOS). Previously within corporate strategy I had broad influence over all aspects of technology and acquisitions and helped formulate Yahoo's platform, data, insights and open strategy.

Before Yahoo, I sold my company, Gauntlet Systems, to Borland and took on the role of Chief Architect there. Gauntlet's technology has been integrated into Borland's LQM products. Gauntlet was formed while I was an EIR at Accel Venture Partners which I joined in 2004. I remain a Venture Consultant there.

Before Accel I was a member of the Technology Advancement Group at BEA Systems where I worked on all aspects of the WebLogic Server product line. Originally I was an early employee of WebLogic itself since 1996 before we were acquired by BEA in 1998. I also contribute to open source projects and volunteer my time to the Java Community Process through a couple of JSRs.

Sam Pullara’s Specialties:

technologist, due diligence, server architecture, java development, open source, funding, venture capital, scaling, performance, virtualization, opensocial, hadoop, web services