MS-DOS Pioneer Joins Jelastic

Jelastic, provider of a platform as a service (PaaS) for Java and PHP apps, has bolstered its development team with the addition of a former Microsoft architect and developer.

Jelastic announced that Mark Zbikowski, a former Microsoft software architect and prominent software developer with more than 30 years of experience, is joining the Palo Alto, California-based company as a senior technical adviser.

Advisory role

In this capacity, Zbikowski will assist Jelastic as a resource to the development team and adviser to senior management. Jelastic is a PaaS cloud computing service that provides networks, servers and storage solutions to software development clients. He is pictured here on a visit to Jelastic in 2012m, with Jelastic’s founder Constantin Alexandrov.

It is a cloud hosting platform for Java and PHP applications. The main competitors of Jelastic are Google App Engine, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku and Cloud Foundry.

“We are very happy to have Mark as part of the Jelastic team,” Dmitry Sotnikov, chief operating officer at Jelastic, said in a statement. “He is not only one of the innovators in system software, his expertise and advice [are] invaluable. Mark’s experience in his prior work has always been about platforms that are high performing, run at large-scale, handle any applications, and at the same time are easy for users. Jelastic is the platform that makes automated hosting and scaling of applications easy without code changes required. Mark should feel right at home.”

While working at Microsoft, Zbikowski spearheaded efforts in MS-DOS and was a key contributor to OS/2, Windows NT and Cairo. He also was honored for 25 years of service with Microsoft in 2006, the first employee, excluding Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, to receive this honor, Jelastic officials said.

Among his accomplishments, Zbikowski designed the DOS executable file format, and his initials “MZ” appear in the headers of that file format to this day.

He is also one of the key developers of Windows NTFS and Windows 2000/XP/Vista. Over the years he has been an active member and contributor to projects involving up to 1,000 engineers.

Promising platform

Zbikowski holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in applied mathematics and master’s degrees from Yale University and the University of Washington.

Zbikowski joins an impressive team of advisers at Jelastic, including Serguei Beloussov, an entrepreneur who founded Parallels and many other successful ventures.

Several high-profile technical gurus are already endorsing Jelastic, including James Gosling, the father of Java; David Blevins, who founded the TomEE project and was the co-founder of OpenEJB; and Michael “Monty” Widenius, the author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database and MariaDB.

“I’m excited to be working with the great development team at Jelastic,” Zbikowski said in a statement. “They have created an extremely interesting and high quality product.”

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Originally published on eWeek.