William L. Franklin

William L. Franklin's experience spans more than 25 years, leading successful teams of software development technologists in a variety of cross-functional environments. These teams delivered enterprise products that include operating systems, database engines, migration tools, and e-commerce. Bill joined HP in 2012, focusing on the use of OpenStack across HP’s Converged Cloud portfolio.
His experience serving as an executive advisor to several startups gives Bill a valuable perspective on the business implications of engineering decisions. This experience has been refined during a career that included Vice President of Engineering roles at Sun Microsystems, Cloudscaling, Clustra Systems, Unikala Software, and Alibris. He also served in product development, product management, and marketing roles prior to focusing his career on engineering leadership.
While at Sun Microsystems Bill was responsible for the core engineering of Solaris, and Sun’s distribution of OpenSolaris. He served as the executive liaison to opensolaris.org, ran the hosting of opensolaris.org and oversaw the contribution of a number of projects to Apache.org. Additionally, Bill has worked closely with a number of open source communities, including projects within Apache, MySQL, postgresql, OpenSolaris, OpenStack and others.
Bill earned Bachelor’s Degrees in Computer Science and Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a M.Sc. by Research in Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of Essex, Colchester, England.