Willem van Biljon (born 1961) is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

. Van Biljon graduated from the

University of Cape Town The University of Cape Town (UCT) (, ) is a public university, public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university status in 1918, making it the oldest univer ...

with a degree in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

. He held engineering and research positions at LinkData, the Institute for Applied Computer Science and the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences. Van Biljon 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. Van Biljon worked for

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

where he, along with Chris Pinkham and Christopher Brown, led the team that developed Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Willem built the business plan for the service and was responsible for product management and marketing for the public cloud service. In 2006, van Biljon left

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

and later started a venture with Chris Pinkham. The company, Nimbula, was focused on cloud computing software and was funded by

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

and

Accel Partners Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is a global venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ope ...

. In March 2013, Nimbula was acquired by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

. Van Biljon co-authored seven

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s in cloud computing including "Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes", "Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems".

Publications

* Hirsch, M, SR Schach, and WR van Biljon, "High-Level Debugging Systems for Pascal: Interpreter versus Compiler," Quaest. Informaticae 3 (3), pp 9–13, August 1987. * 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. * Van Biljon, WR, DA Sewry, and MA 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, pp 437–455. 1988.

References

1961 births Living people People from Pretoria Businesspeople from Cape Town Afrikaner people University of Cape Town alumni Amazon (company) people {{compu-bio-stub