Willem Van Biljon
Encyclopedia
Willem van Biljon is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in South Africa
. Willem graduated from the University of Cape Town
with a degree in Computer Science
.
Willem was formerly at Amazon.com
where, along with Chris Pinkham
and Christopher Brown led the team that Chris put together to build Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Willem built the business plan for the service and was responsible for product management and marketing for the highly successful public cloud service.
Prior to Amazon.com
, Willem co-founded Mosaic Software. Mosaic built the Postilion payment system, the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems (Windows). Mosaic's investors included GE
and Paul Maritz
. The company became one of the top three payment processing software vendors in the world and was sold in 2004 to S1 Corp.
Prior to Mosaic, Willem held a number of engineering and research positions at LinkData, the Institute for Applied Computer Science and the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
In 2006, Willem left Amazon Web Services
and has since started a new venture with his long time friend Chris Pinkham
. The company, Nimbula, is focused on Cloud Computing software and is funded by Sequoia Capital
and Accel Partners
.
Willem has co-authored a couple of patent application
s: "Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes", "Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems".
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
. Willem graduated from the University of Cape Town
University of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town is a public research university located in Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. UCT was founded in 1829 as the South African College, and is the oldest university in South Africa and the second oldest extant university in Africa.-History:The roots of...
with a degree in Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
.
Willem was formerly at Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
where, along with Chris Pinkham
Chris Pinkham
Chris Pinkham is an entrepreneur and technologist born in Singapore, raised and educated in Britain and South Africa.Chris was formerly Vice President, IT Infrastructure at Amazon.com, responsible for the company's global infrastructure engineering and operations...
and Christopher Brown led the team that Chris put together to build Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Willem built the business plan for the service and was responsible for product management and marketing for the highly successful public cloud service.
Prior to Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
, Willem co-founded Mosaic Software. Mosaic built the Postilion payment system, the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems (Windows). Mosaic's investors included GE
Gê
Gê are the people who spoke Ge languages of the northern South American Caribbean coast and Brazil. In Brazil the Gê were found in Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Piaui, Mato Grosso, Goias, Tocantins, Maranhão, and as far south as Paraguay....
and Paul Maritz
Paul Maritz
Paul Maritz is CEO of VMware Corporation , and a past senior executive at Microsoft.Born and raised in Rhodesia , his family later moved to South Africa where he was schooled at Highbury Preparatory School and Hilton College. He received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Natal,...
. The company became one of the top three payment processing software vendors in the world and was sold in 2004 to S1 Corp.
Prior to Mosaic, Willem held a number of engineering and research positions at LinkData, the Institute for Applied Computer Science and the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
In 2006, Willem left Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...
and has since started a new venture with his long time friend Chris Pinkham
Chris Pinkham
Chris Pinkham is an entrepreneur and technologist born in Singapore, raised and educated in Britain and South Africa.Chris was formerly Vice President, IT Infrastructure at Amazon.com, responsible for the company's global infrastructure engineering and operations...
. The company, Nimbula, is focused on Cloud Computing software and is funded by Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital is a Californian venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms", and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms"...
and Accel Partners
Accel Partners
Accel Partners is a global venture and growth equity firm funding companies from inception through the growth stage.The firm is based in Palo Alto, California with major offices in Bangalore, Beijing, London, and Shanghai....
.
Willem has co-authored a couple of patent application
Patent application
A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for the invention described and claimed by that application. An application consists of a description of the invention , together with official forms and correspondence relating to the application...
s: "Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes", "Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems".
Publications
- M. Hirsch, S. R. Schach, and W. R. van Biljon, "High-Level Debugging Systems for Pascal: Interpreter versus Compiler," Quaest. Informaticae 3 (3) (Aug. 1985), 9-13.
- Van Biljon WR, "A geographic database system", Proceedings Auto Carto 8, Baltimore USA, pp 689–700, March 1987.
- Van Biljon WR, "Towards a fuzzy mathematical model of data quality in a GIS", Proceedings EDIS '87 Conference, Pretoria SA, 11 pp, September 1987.
- W. R. Van Biljon, D. A. Sewry, and M. A. Mulders. "Register allocation in a pattern matching code generator." Software: Practice & Experience, 17(8):521–531, August 1987.
- van Biljon, WR, "Extending Petri Nets for Specifying Man-Machine Dialogues", Int. J. Man-Machine Studies, Vol. 28, pages 437-455. 1988.