Puppet CTO Abby Kearns Joins Lightbend’s Board of Directors

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 12, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Lightbend today announced the appointment of Abby Kearns, a technology executive with deep experience in cloud native and open source technology, to the company’s board of directors. Kearns is chief technology officer at Puppet, the industry standard for infrastructure automation. Prior to Puppet, Kearns was CEO and Executive Director at Cloud Foundry Foundation.

“We are thrilled to kick off a new year by welcoming Abby to the Lightbend board,” said Mark Brewer, CEO at Lightbend. “Her experience at the intersection of infrastructure, open source and cloud native architectures will be of great value to Lightbend in its mission to enable enterprises to accelerate and increase value from their application modernization and IT transformation initiatives.”

With over twenty years in the tech world, Kearns is a true veteran of the technology industry. Her lengthy career has spanned product marketing, product management and consulting across Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. At Puppet, she leads the vision and direction of its current and future product portfolio. Before joining Puppet, Abby was the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation where she focused on driving the Foundation’s vision and growing the open source project. Through her tenure, Abby built an install base that included more than half of the Fortune 500. Abby has deep cloud experience. At Pivotal, she drove the adoption of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and at Verizon, she led the Product Management teams dedicated to the early days of cloud services. Her background also includes operations spanning companies such as Totality, EDS, and Sabre.

“The industry is still early in its use of cloud-native application architectures, especially serverless capabilities,” said Kearns, “Lightbend started the conversation by developing the Reactive Manifesto, and by launching the Reactive Foundation to establish a common approach for cloud-native application architectures. Lightbend helps customers build systems that are more robust, more resilient, more flexible, and better positioned to meet modern application workload demands. Innovative companies such as Tesla, Starbucks and Capital One are already pushing the boundaries of what’s possible through their implementation of Lightbend technologies and services, and I’m excited by the opportunity to help Lightbend drive that conversation forward.”

About Lightbend
Lightbend (@Lightbend) is leading the enterprise transformation toward real-time, cloud-native applications and setting the standard for cloud native architectures. Lightbend provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructure like Red Hat OpenShift. The most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with Lightbend, engaging billions of users every day through software that is changing the world. For more information, visit www.lightbend.com.

Editorial Contact
Lonn Johnston for Lightbend
+1 650.219.7764
lonn@flak42.com