Bertrand Serlet & Upthere in the Cloud
Bertrand Serlet worked at Xerox PARC, and went to work with Steve Jobs when he founded NeXT computer. When Apple bought NeXT, Mr. Serlet went with Steve Jobs to work at Apple—Wired described him as legendary within Apple when he left the company in 2011—and eventually took the title of senior VP of software engineering.
When he left Apple, he said in a statement that, “I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science.”
At some point that turned into founding the startup Upthere, which was described in trademark application documents uncovered by BusinessInsider as, a “cloud hosting provider” that offers “consulting services in the field of cloud computing.”
A job posting for a “Visual Design Engineer” advertised that, “Our founders were key to building the world’s leading operating system (Mac OS X) and database (Oracle) and have a clear vision of core technology for a Cloud OS.”
The Oracle connection mentioned is apparently Roger Bodamer, who used to be vice president of product operations and development at Apple. Before that, he worked at Oracle.
It will be very interesting to see what Upthere is truly working on. For instance, a “Cloud OS” is quite a bit different from a “cloud hosting provider” offering “consulting services.”
BusinessInsider believes the company is working on new ways to store files in the cloud, which could put it in direct or indirect competition with Google (Google Cloud), Apple (iCloud), Amazon (Amazon Cloud Services), Dropbox, and a host of other cloud storage companies.