Apple poaches new web hosting guru from Yahoo
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011Apple appears to have poached Yahoo’s head of data operations – just months after making its last hire.
Scott Noteboom, formerly vice-president of data centre engineering and operations at Yahoo, now lists his occupation as “distinguished gentleman” at Apple on his LinkedIn biography.
The updated biography has caused a flurry in the web hosting industry and in the industry press.
Apple has instigated a lot of activity in the data centre space this year. This activity includes the building of its new $1bn, 500,000 square foot data centre operations hub in North Carolina, USA, and the start of its iCloud file storage cloud.
Noteboom worked at Yahoo from 2005, during which time he launched a number of data centre initiatives. Before this, he worked as senior director of data centre operations at data centre company AboveNet. The company had the second-largest data centre collocation footprint in the world at the time, according to Noteboom’s LinkedIn profile.
The news will come as a surprise to many, not least because Apple made its last data centre hire quite recently. It poached Kevin Timmons from his role as head of Microsoft’s data centre in April. Timmons is now reported to have moved on to US data storage company CyrusOne.

