Derek Parham

Derek Parham has over 12 years of experience as an entrepreneur and technical lead. He built Google Apps for Business from scratch and served as its technical lead of over 100 engineers for almost six years, growing the product to 40 million customers. The project utilized and developed some of the world's largest scalable systems, along with shaping what is now referred to as "the cloud".

Derek is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Hattery and serves as technical investor and adviser to various start-ups in addition to being involved in the film industry, investing and producing feature films. He also serves on the board of Engine Advocacy, an organization that works to engage startups in educating political leaders on the economic importance of the startup community.

Presentation: "Google Apps’ Identity Crisis"

Track: Tales from Silicon Valley

Time: Thursday 16:10 - 17:00

Location: Seacliff AB

Abstract: For many years, Google Apps customers couldn’t access the majority of Google’s vast services without reverting to their personal accounts. This was due to an early, identity-related design decision which led to the need for one of the largest and most complicated user migration and code refactoring in Google’s history. This identity crisis isn’t unique to Google though, and can affect many web services that exist today. The vast majority of online apps assume that users only have one persona while accessing the service, but that is rapidly changing. As businesses, schools and other organizations move to the cloud, more users will be accessing the same service in different contexts. For example, a user who uses a photo service to store both her personal photos and her employer’s marketing albums. Google Apps was one of the first online services to cater to both consumer and business users at the same time, and as a pioneer, made and learned from early mistakes. Come listen to the lessons learned plus how Google executed this 4+ year migration which included 6 separate internal projects, involved dozens of teams, scores of codebases, over 4 million organizations, and in excess of 40 million active users.