D. Britton Johnston

“Britt” Johnston is Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Corporation, which he joined in 2005. Today he oversees technical direction for Microsoft’s worldwide incubation organization, a portfolio of varied businesses including public cloud, cloud integrated storage, and large format touch devices. Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Johnston held a succession of development, engineering and managerial positions with Digital Equipment Corporation and then Progress Software. During this time, as co-founder and CTO of NuSphere, he created the first commercial multi-platform LAMP distribution. Among career highlights are work on the first generation of relational database products including the first shared disk cluster database system, one of the first commercial SQL query engines, and database programming tools. Working with partners like Intel he helped create high performance multi-processor support for database systems. Mr. Johnston was involved in creating MySQL and the dual license business model used by many open source software companies. At Microsoft, his team created a programming model for databases called the Entity Framework. Mr. Johnston founded Microsoft’s database appliance development team that pioneered cloud concepts and created the first private cloud appliance in the industry, an effort that influenced Microsoft’s current “Hybrid Cloud” strategy.