I am pleased to announce that *Ahmed Kamal* has joined my team at Canonical to build the Ubuntu Cloud Community.

Although Ahmed’s formal background is Electronics and Communications engineering, he was always a Linux geek at heart. He touched his first Linux CD in 1998 with Red Hat 5.x and has been hooked ever since. He says:

> “I think the main reasons why I fell in love with Linux was because it’s predictable! It doesn’t try to hide anything, you can always understand why things happen the way they do. Also the Linux community was mind blowing to me, to imagine those millions of people networking and helping each other move Linux forward was/is just amazing. This was especially true back in the days when Linux was not yet an enterprise rock-star. Over the years I had been involved with Linux one way or the other. I had worked at a great redhat partner in Egypt, where I had the chance to do consultation and Linux professional services work for some of the largest enterprises. I had also enjoyed evangelizing Linux and open-source to hundreds of people through various trainings. I started the Egyptian Open-Solaris group as well as engaged in various university talks to introduce open-source concepts in general. It is such a great feeling to introduce and excite minds about FOSS. For the past couple of years, I had been working with a bunch of extremely talented engineers building next generation cloud and virtualization management solutions. The technology base we were working on later got acquired by Sun Microsystems and later of-course by Oracle. Cloud computing is extremely exciting to me, while the term has been abused to fit almost anything, I am confident of the potential cloud computing has to offer. The cloud is not a single technology, it’s rather a paradigm shift of our expectations and how we use technology”.

Ahmed is hugely excited about being part of the team and helping to grow the community:

> “What excites me the most about joining the Ubuntu community team is the far reaching impact of what that team’s work on the foss community at large. My role is to connect the Ubuntu cloud community with Canonical’s engineering teams making sure community contributers can find their way, as well as to ignite worldwide excitement about the great work Canonical is doing to innovate in the open-source cloud computing domain. What I find very exciting is that the result of our work with the community, is far more reaching than anything I could have ever done on my own”.

Ahmed is exciting about making the cloud accessible to all:

> “Cloud computing is re-shaping computing as we know it. Ubuntu is easily the master of the Linux desktop, and is re-shaping the open-source desktop and server experience. Put the two together, and you can understand why I am tremendously excited about a cloud computing solution based on Ubuntu and open-source software. While Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is an awesome product, that’s not where it ends. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Canonical’s server and cloud engineering teams are hard at work innovating on top of the cloud. And from what I’ve seen, it is going to be awesome. If you’re into open-source and you’re into cloud computing, you’re in for a treat, so stay tuned!”

All, please welcome Ahmed to the team!