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 southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

. Van Biljon graduated from the

University of Cape Town The University of Cape Town (UCT) ( af, Universiteit van Kaapstad, xh, Yunibesithi ya yaseKapa) is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university statu ...

with a degree in

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

. 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 Paul Alistair Maritz (born March 16, 1955) is a computer scientist and software executive. He held positions at large companies including Microsoft and EMC Corporation. He currently serves as chairman of Pivotal Software. Early life Paul Marit ...

. 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. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

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 Nimbula was a computer software company that existed from 2008 to 2017. It developed software for the implementation of public and private cloud computing environments. History The company was first incorporated as Benguela, based in Menlo Park, ...

, was focused on cloud computing software and was funded by

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

and

Accel Partners Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American 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 ...

. In March 2013, Nimbula was acquired by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

. 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 enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

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 People from Cape Town Afrikaner people South African businesspeople University of Cape Town alumni Amazon (company) people {{compu-bio-stub