Microsoft Veteran Bob Muglia Tapped to Run Enterprise Computing Startup

Bob Muglia, who spent 23 years in various roles at Microsoft, is now CEO of Snowflake Computing, a new enterprise computing startup.

The two-year-old, 35-employee company is looking to create more modern data warehouse software designed for an era when most data is not only analyzed in the cloud, but created there.

Muglia worked for two years at Juniper Networks after leaving Microsoft in 2011.

“As I left Juniper last December, I recognized I really didn’t want to work for another big company, at least not in the short term,” Muglia told Re/code in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “A lot of the innovation that is happening is really happening at the smaller companies these days.”

It’s also a change in geography for the longtime Puget Sound resident. Snowflake is based in San Mateo, Calif. and Muglia said he is spending most of his time here, though he still has his home in Seattle.

Snowflake has venture backing, Muglia said, but has yet to detail the level or who its investors are. It also hasn’t gone into great deal about its product plans, though Muglia said it is working with early beta customers.

Muglia said he really wanted to work on software that cut across many industries, as he did when running the server and tools business at Microsoft. Data warehousing is a $9 billion business that is really just discovering the cloud, he added.

“A very tiny percentage has moved up there,” Muglia said, and yet nearly two-thirds of data is created in the cloud, with even more information that can be better analyzed there than on a local server.

“Things like Hadoop, they are not really designed for data warehousing,” he said. “They are good at some of the things they do but they don’t really solve the broader business problem.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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