Apple has poached Scott Noteboom from Yahoo. According to Noteboom’s LinkedIn page, the once Senior VP of Data Centre Engineering and Operations at Yahoo is now a “distinguished gentleman” at Apple. Giga Om reporter Stacy Higginbotham has reported that the move was an attempt to reaffirm “Apple’s commitment to the cloud and getting to webscale.”
Back in November, Olivier Sanche, Apple’s Global Data Center Director, died of a heart attack at the age of 41. There has been no public announcement of a replacement from Apple. Since then Apple has hired two prominent data centre experts. First it was Kevin Timmons, who has recently left for CyrusOne, and now it’s Scott Noteboom.
With Siri and other Apple web services, like iCloud, getting pounded lately it’s not surprising that the company is looking to find someone capable of scaling their operations in the short term. Scott Noteboom has certainly been there before, previously working on Yahoo’s chicken coop data centres, and other projects at Yahoo.