Henry Brian Valentine (born November 28, 1959) is an American software executive. He has held positions at large companies including

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

and Amazon.com.

Early life

Born in

Centralia, Washington Centralia () is a city in Lewis County, Washington, United States. It is located along Interstate 5 near the midpoint between Seattle and Portland, Oregon. The city had a population of 18,183 at the 2020 census. Centralia is twinned with Ch ...

, he graduated from high school in 1977 and enrolled in Centralia Community College (CCC). Upon graduating from CCC in 1979 with an

associate degree An associate degree is an undergraduate degree awarded after a course of post-secondary study lasting two to three years. It is a level of qualification above a high school diploma, GED, or matriculation, and below a bachelor's degree. Th ...

, Valentine then enrolled in the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seatt ...

's engineering department. Valentine spent one year at UW before taking a leave of absence in 1980. In the fall of 1981, Valentine enrolled in the Computer Science and Math school at

Eastern Washington University Eastern Washington University (EWU) is a public university in Cheney, Washington. It also offers programs at a campus in EWU Spokane at the Riverpoint Campus and other campus locations throughout the state. Founded in 1882, the university is ...

(EWU) in Cheney, Washington. In his senior year at EWU, Valentine was selected to develop the software for an automated energy management and control system. He graduated from EWU with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

degree in Computer Science in May 1983 and took a job as a software engineer at

, working on software for in-circuit emulators, and major systems programming for

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

and VMS applications.

Microsoft

In August 1987, Valentine resigned from Intel and took a position at Microsoft after his former Intel colleague

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 Mari ...

invited him to join. He spent the next 19 years launching some of the most widely used software products of their time. He led the team that launched

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the related ...

4.0, 5.0 and 5.5. As a result of his success with Exchange, he was personally asked by

Steve Ballmer Steven Anthony Ballmer (; March 24, 1956) is an American business magnate and investor who served as the chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball As ...

in 1998 to rescue the then-failing Windows 2000 project. In one year, Valentine was able to successfully deliver

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was offici ...

in December 1999. He then went on to lead the teams responsible for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

, XP SP2,

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, 2 ...

and

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

Amazon

In 2006, Valentine moved to join Amazon.com where he built and led the eCommerce Platform team, before leaving in early 2014.

Post-Amazon

Valentine joined Ivy Softworks, an Innovation Studio in Seattle, in September 2014 where he worked until 2015.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Valentine, Brian Amazon (company) people Microsoft employees Living people Microsoft Windows people 1959 births People from Centralia, Washington