Cloudbook Profile: Gretchen Curtis - Piston Cloud Computing

Gretchen Curtis is the Director of Business Operations at Piston Cloud Computing, a start-up formed in early 2011 by the founding technical architect of NASA's Nebula cloud infrastructure, and a major architect from the OpenStack project.

Gretchen began her career ten years ago in technical staffing, helping to build teams at Bay Area companies such as AOL, Fujitsu, Sun and Oracle. In 2006 her love of Web 2.0, social media and viral marketing led her join Flock, Inc., the social web browser. As Sr. Manager of Business Operations at Flock, Gretchen oversaw the Finance, Human Resource and Legal Departments, established the company’s Canadian subsidiary in British Columbia and helped secure it’s third round of financing in 2007.

In 2009, Gretchen joined NASA as the Manager of Communications for the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing project, based out of Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, and in 2010 was promoted as the Communications Director for NASA's CTO and founder of NASA Nebula, Chris C. Kemp.

Gretchen is a vocal proponent of the Federal cloud computing initiative and has worked with writing teams at OMB and GSA on speeches, reports and white papers for Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. She was one of the principal writers of the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy released in early 2011.

Contributions

Contributions

Podcast: NASA: From the Stars to the Clouds
April 12 2010
How does NASA match good government and massive computational needs? By launching the federal governments most aggressive cloud computing pilot project, of course. The Director of Communications for the NASA Nebula project discusses infrastructure-as-a-service and the future of the public sector cloud.

Article: Nebula's Role in Open Government
April 07 2010
As part of the Open Government Directive, federal agencies had to publish an Open Government Plan laying out how they intend to be more open and integrate Open Government principles into their activities. NASA's Open Government framework postulates that agencies must focus on policy, tools, and culture to successfully implement Open Government principles within their organization. Nebula was identified as one of the primary tools that will enable NASA to more easily engage with the public in addition to providing a more efficient method for NASA to deliver IT services to its Scientists and Researchers.

Article: Actions Government can take to push adoption of Cloud Computing
February 18 2010
There are several key actions that the Government should take to accelerate the successful adoption of Cloud Computing. Here is an overview of some of these steps and why they are important to the successful adoption of Government Cloud Computing.

Article: Gov 2.0 Guide to Cloud Computing
February 18 2010
Cloud computing offers a cost-effective and service oriented approach for sharing computing resources across the government. Being able to access a powerful pool of common infrastructure, applications, information, and solutions greatly improves communication and collaboration accross government in addition to providing incredible cost savings. The overall objective is to create a more agile federal enterprise, where services can be provisioned and reused on demand to meet changing business needs. Here is an overview of the US government's cloud computing activities.

Article: Why We Need Cloud Pilots
January 22 2010
Federal Agencies need to take Cloud Computing for a test drive, kick the tires, and look under the hood. The best way to do this is with Cloud Computing Pilots. Pilot projects are vital to the health of Government IT because they provide hands-on experience and give an intimate picture of both the technology and operating model.

Article: Enabling Participatory Exploration Through Open Data APIs
December 18 2009
In line with the Obama administration's efforts to establish an open and transparent government, one of Nebula's goals is to create a secure gateway through which NASA can share select data sets with outside researchers and the American public while at the same time, limit access to it's highly-secured internal network.