Lew Tucker

Lewis Wiley Tucker
Born	(1950-04-24) April 24, 1950 West Allenhurst, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist, technology executive
Years active	1976–present
Known for	Java platform development, Salesforce AppExchange, OpenStack cloud computing

Lewis Wiley Tucker (born April 24, 1950) is a prominent American computer scientist, advocate for open source technologies, and seasoned technology leader with a career marked by significant innovations. He has held senior executive positions at Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com, and Cisco Systems, playing a pivotal role in advancing the Java platform, establishing Salesforce's AppExchange marketplace, and contributing to the OpenStack cloud computing ecosystem.

Early life and education

Raised in West Allenhurst, New Jersey, Tucker is the son of renowned big band leader Tommy Tucker. He attended the Peddie School before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Cornell University. He later obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Polytechnic Institute of New York in 1984.

Career

Tucker’s professional journey began in 1976 as a laboratory technician at Cornell’s Laboratory of Neurobiology, where he applied computational techniques to medical imaging and contributed to neurobiology research publications. His doctoral studies concentrated on computer vision and the design of parallel computing architectures tailored for biomedical image analysis.

Following his doctorate, he joined the startup Thinking Machines as research director specializing in computer vision. There, he played an integral role in developing software and hardware for the Connection Machine, a massively parallel supercomputer utilized by national laboratories.

In 1994, after Sun Microsystems acquired Thinking Machines, Tucker led an engineering group based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. He subsequently relocated to California to become part of the founding team behind Java. As Director of ISV Relations, he was instrumental in driving Java adoption across both enterprise organizations and startups. By 2000, Tucker advanced to Vice President of Internet Services at Sun Microsystems, managing critical web properties.

In 2004, he joined Salesforce.com where he spearheaded the creation of AppExchange—one of the earliest online marketplaces dedicated to SaaS applications. Later, he transitioned to Radar Networks to work on a semantic web platform leveraging RDF technology.

With the emergence of cloud computing, Tucker returned to Sun Microsystems in 2008 as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer focused on cloud platform development. However, this initiative was curtailed when Oracle acquired Sun in 2010.

Subsequently, Tucker accepted a position at Cisco Systems as their inaugural Vice President and CTO for cloud computing. Under his leadership, Cisco became a leading contributor to the open-source OpenStack project. He also served as vice-chairman of the OpenStack Foundation and held board memberships with both the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Select articles and presentations

• Tucker, L.W., "OpenStack and the Power of Community-Developed Software", OpenStack Austin Summit, April 2016.
• Hillis, W. D., and L.W. Tucker, "The CM-5 Connection Machine: A scalable Supercomputer", Communications of the ACM, pp. 31–40, Nov. 1993.
• Tucker, L.W., "Data Parallelism: Image Understanding and the Connection Machine System", in "Parallel Architectures and Algorithms for Image Understanding," Academic Press, 1991.
• Tucker, L.W. and G. Robertson, "Architecture and Applications of the Connection Machine," IEEE Computer, pp 26–38, Aug. 1988.
• L. Tucker, C. Feynman and D. Fritzsche, "Object recognition using the Connection Machine," in Proceedings CVPR '88, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, 1988 pp. 871–878.
• Tucker, Lewis W. "Labeling connected components on a massively parallel tree machine." In Proc. IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 124–129. 1986
• Tucker, Lewis W. "Control strategy for an expert vision system using quadtree refinement." In Proceedings of the IEEE workshop on Computer vision: Representation and control, Annapolis, MD, USA, pp. 214–218. 1984.