Mr. Bill Hilf

A Senior Vice President at Hewlett-Packard for the HP Helion Cloud Product Management organization, he is responsible for driving HP Cloud solutions and services to market. He began his career as a software developer and engineering leader through a variety of software start-ups in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Prior to joining HP, he was General Manager of product management for Microsoft's Cloud computing platform, Windows Azure, where he led product planning, product management and technical product management. Before Azure, he was General Manager of the Technical Computing group at Microsoft, which built solutions for a broad range of scientific and engineering challenges, including High-performance computing server systems, Parallel Computing languages and runtimes, mathematical modeling tools, and Cloud computing. He previously led product management for Microsoft?s multibillion dollar Windows Server business, including the launch of Windows Server 2008. His first role at Microsoft was leading the Platform Strategy Group, helping bridge the Microsoft and Open Source communities by developing and driving Microsoft?s strategy for Open Source interoperability. Before joining Microsoft, he worked at IBM as a Senior Architect and expert in Linux and Open Source. Prior to joining IBM, he was the Sr. Director of Engineering for eToys and worked as an architect and software engineer for CNET Networks. While at Microsoft, he made a number of controversial statements in his Open Source role, claiming that, "The Free Software movement is dead...Linux doesn't exist in 2007.? implying that free software is equivalent to freeware. His role at the time focused heavily on business and enterprise users, as noted in his statement about OSS and philosophy, "Most CIOs don't really want to make decisions based on philosophy. There is no discussion that 'all software must be free because I believe in the movement.' So, it is to the betterment of the open source community that it has matured". Albeit a controversial issue, during his time in this role, he was recognized as one of the 25 most influential people at Microsoft. He currently holds 15 patents in the distributed computing and application server domains. On a personal note, he is the founder of a sports-based non-profit organization called High Five Hope, which focuses on homeless and street children in developing countries. Additionally, he works with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to help build computer labs in refugee camps. For this work, he was awarded the 2012 Seattle 2.0 Award for 'Do Gooder of the Year' for his ?humanitarian work with High Five Hope.?