Joyent Co-Founder Jason Hoffman Steps Down As CTO Of The Cloud Computing Pioneer

Joyent co-founder Jason Hoffman is leaving his position as CTO of the pioneering cloud computing company. Hoffman said in a blog post that he will remain connected to Joyent as an advisor. We’ve reached out to Hoffman about his next steps, as well as Joyent to ask who their next CTO will be.

In his blog post, Hoffman wrote:

Building innovative technology has always been a core value of ours, and it permeates all that we do, whether it’s sponsoring and nurturing game changing open source technologies like Node.js or innovating a new, cloud-native way to do virtualization, liberating our customers to create, invent and scale.

In short, that “think differently” spirit of innovation is built into our DNA and we’ve accomplished many amazing things living by it. It’s also something I value, and for that reason, I’ve made the decision to embody it in a new way by moving on to pursue new ideas and projects. I’ve loved the process of building Joyent into what it is today, as any respectable founder wishes, you look for people better than yourself who can go execute and you let them do that. The company is in great shape, with a brilliant management team and a change-the-world technology vision in very capable hands with Bryan Cantrill.

With Hoffman as its CTO, Joyent cultivated a reputation for breaking barriers in cloud computing and setting itself apart by building open-source technologies that don’t require investments in locked-up converged systems.

Under Hoffman’s stewardship, Joyent’s tech innovations have included the Manta Storage Service system, which launched in June and allows stored data to be queried immediately without the time-consuming and costly task of managing its underlying infrastructure. Manta took four years of research and development and, as our enterprise writer Alex Williams noted, the service’s ramifications for cloud computing are considerable and make Joyent more relevant as an infrastructure and services provider. In an interview just before Manta’s launch, Hoffman said Joyent will continue to make several announcements about new data services, all steps to position the company as a strong competitor against AWS, Microsoft, IBM and other big names in cloud computing.

Hoffman briefly served as Joyent’s interim CEO after co-founder David Young left that post in May 2012. Former Force10 Networks CEO and President Henry Wasik joined Joyent as CEO in November 2012.