Google and Snapchat Veteran Magnusson to Lead Oracle Cloud

Business software giant Oracle is getting serious about cloud computing and has made its first hire demonstrating exactly how serious.

Sources familiar with the move tell Re/code that two weeks ago it hired Peter S. Magnusson, the former VP of Engineering at Snapchat and a former director of engineering at Google, to run its cloud computing efforts.

At the company’s Oracle Openworld event in San Francisco last month, founder and CTO Larry Ellison spent a lot of time talking about Oracle’s plans to build a platform-as-a-service and an infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Among its new offerings are its core database technology, which is now being offered as a service available in the cloud, as well as a cloud-ready version of Java, the programming language over which it took stewardship when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.

Magnusson will be working directly with Ellison as well as with Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s EVP for product development. Oracle Cloud is said to be “hiring aggressively” in the Seattle and San Francisco Bay areas, though it’s being considered a global organization within Oracle.

Magnusson raised eyebrows when he bolted from Snapchat this summer after only six months on the job. He had been considered a “big get” for the mobile communications service at a moment earlier this year when it sought to beef up its in-house engineering talent.

He had been lured away from Google where he was on the founding team that built App Engine, the search giant’s service for building and hosting cloud and Web applications. Magnusson essentially ran the product. On his personal blog he called Google App Engine “arguably the first, largest, and most influential Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach to cloud computing.”

Snapchat, it turned out, was one of App Engines’ biggest customers, which led to that move.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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