Stephen L. Diamond Chair, IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative; General Manager, Industry Standards Office, EMC; Past President, IEEE Computer Society

Steve Diamond is a IEEE Senior Member and IEEE Computer Society past president. He is the general manager of the Industry Standards Office at EMC Corp., in San Francisco. Steve Diamond draws his expertise from 30 years of senior management, marketing, business development, and engineering in semiconductors, software, systems, and standards. Prior to his job at EMC, he was director of product management for intercloud computing at Cisco Systems,in San Jose, Calif., and vice president of marketing at Equator Technologies, a VLIW signal processor semiconductor company later sold to Pixelworks, also in San Jose. Before that, he did mergers and acquisitions at National Semiconductor and ran Sparc architecture marketing at Sun Microsystems, both in Santa Clara, Calif.

He currently is leading the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative (CCI), which is an IEEE wide focus being applied to help accelerate the development of cloud computing. He was convinced that IEEE was uniquely positioned to play a major role in accelerating and shaping that future. So he brought together a team of experienced colleagues, and, with the support of the IEEE Future Directions Committee and seed funding from the IEEE New Initiatives Committee, developed the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative. "Much as we saw with the development of the Internet, cloud computing will impact the entire information and communications ecosystem, from embedded controllers, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and personal computers, to enterprise data centers and supercomputers," he says. "The smartphone is the fastestgrowing consumer technology in history, having reached 50 percent penetration of U.S. households in just 7 years. It took the home computer nearly 20 years to do the same thing," he continues. "Cloud computing will give smartphone users infinite computing resources at their mobile beck and call. The implications of this transition are huge."

Steve Diamond also chairs the Cloud Computing Standards Committee that oversees working groups developing IEEE cloud standards. Two working groups are already underway: IEEE P2301 Draft Guide for Cloud Portability and Interoperability Profiles, a guide to the cloud standards landscape, and IEEE P2302 Draft Standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation, which focuses on standards for cloud-to-cloud interfaces. Steve Diamond is also chairing the cloud standards panels at the IEEE CLOUD 2012 conference in June, in Honolulu, and IEEE CloudCom 2012 in December, in Taipei.