Nebula Promotes NASA Vet To Oversee OpenStack Effort

Barb Darrow | GigaOM | November 14, 2012

Jesse Andrews, an OpenStack veteran who’s done stints at NASA, ANSO Labs and Rackspace, will lead Nebula’s plug-and-play OpenStack development effort as it nears launch, the company said.

Companies pushing OpenStack love to boast that they have former NASA technologists on staff. After all, NASA, along with Rackspace, incubated the open-source cloud stack. In that vein, Nebula, which is led by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, is naming Jesse Andrews as VP of product management. In that capacity Andrews will oversee the entire Nebula project as the company prepares it for launch.

Andrews has a great OpenStack pedigree. He was also formerly CEO of ANSO Labs,  the NASA spinoff, where he worked with Kemp and the rest of the team behind the Nova compute engine underlying OpenStack.

ANSO was acquired by Rackspace in February, 2011 and Andrews worked on that company’s Cloud Builder program while continuing to contribute to OpenStack. In fact, Andrews is not totally new to Nebula: He was one of the half dozen or so former ANSO people at Rackspace who decamped to Nebula last July...