Sunnyvale, California — Needless to mention that in recent times hordes of engineering talent has been defecting from Yahoo, some are sticking around the Sunnyvale, Calif. campus and moving up. Yahoo has tapped a cloud computing veteran “Raymie Stata” to chief technology officer to fulfill the role vacated by Ari Balogh when he left the company in April, the company announced Thursday.
Stata was previously Yahoo’s chief architect, and was credited by Yahoo as playing an instrumental role in the company’s move to a common distributed infrastructure. “As Chief Architect, Raymie led transformative efforts to rewire Yahoo!, moving from a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform infrastructure,” the company said in a blog post.
He has managed search and advertising technology work, as well as the development of Yahoo’s cloud computing technology. “With his leadership, technical Yahoo’s have focused on core challenges like creating a stable, agile development environment, extracting value from masses of unstructured data, developing scalable global experiences, and architecting a cloud to serve as the foundation for every click across our network.”
During an interview with Venturebeat at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference last week (before his promotion was declared), Stata spoke about Yahoo’s extensive plans for the future.
“Our goal is to create a personally relevant experience for our users,” he said. “Our technical focus is centered around that goal.”
According to Stata, this concentration on personalization will blend Yahoo’s editorial strength with a new push to acquire and develop technology in the area. Strata described the editorial process on the front page as, “half man half machine.”
“Having that human voice in what we do is important, but bringing relevancy algorithms is one of the most exciting thing we are doing technically,” he said.
Based on the outcome, Stata said the company might spread-out the integration to its other properties.
The key to Yahoo’s plan of action lies in its acquisition of Associated Content for $100 million. Stata emphasized that Yahoo would allow Associated Content to operate with large degree of independence.
“A challenge for us is that we do not throttle them, that we do not take our editorial processes and just drop it on what they are doing that messes up their secret sauce.” Stata said.
Speaking on its partnership in search with Microsoft, Stata argued the notion that Yahoo is abandoning search. “If you look at the consumer search experience, that is where the relationship with Microsoft is much more nuanced.”
“We have basically farmed-out in the same way we have on the advertising side,” he said. “On the advertising side we are focusing on large advertisers. Yahoo is the salesforce, on the self serve side it is Microsoft.”
Stata joined Yahoo in 2004 when the company acquired his startup Stata Labs. He will assume the role at a time when Yahoo is actually shifting away from technology as its primary product to focus on content, although Yahoo’s display advertising, search, and mail products still require significant investment.
In his new position, Stata will be manage all of Yahoo’s advanced technologies and lead the technical direction of the company. According to the company, Stata will work with Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, as the two of them look to fill the emptiness left by former Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh.