Yandex is excited to announce it is ramping up its cloud platform initiative, Yandex.Cloud. Over the last year we have been exploring and experimenting with a cloud initiative that would combine our network of state-of-the-art data centers across Western Europe and Russia, our developer talent, and our deep expertise in machine learning and data mining to provide businesses a high-performance cloud computing platform. Today we are excited to take the next step and further expand on the Yandex.Cloud vision.
As more and more businesses migrate their services to the cloud, cloud-computing technologies are becoming an indispensable part of the enterprise. In the Russian market, the demand for cloud services is growing but there are few high-quality cloud providers serving local businesses. Yandex sees an opportunity to build a cloud solution powered by machine learning that will address this issue locally before we expand our offering globally.
“Yandex is uniquely positioned to develop a best-in-class cloud computing solution that meets the technological and business needs of enterprises today,” said Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin. “We have taken the time to understand the needs of enterprise customers and now we are putting the right infrastructure in place to build a cloud computing solution that delivers against these needs.”
Heading the new division is Yan Leshinsky a seasoned engineering leader who brings a wealth of world-class cloud computing expertise and specialization to Yandex. Prior to joining Yandex, Yan managed development teams at Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Yan’s leadership will accelerate Yandex’s initial cloud experiments towards a highly developed solution on the cloud market.
“There are a number of things that attracted me to Yandex and this role. Yandex has access to an amazing pool of math and engineering talent in Russia, which feeds the high amount of intellectual capital at the company,” said Yan. “Yandex also has an organizational and technological framework centered on the customer. That combination of developer talent and customer focus sets Yandex apart and creates a great atmosphere to build out the Yandex.Cloud initiative.”
Yan’s appointment as the head of Yandex.Cloud is another example of Yandex’s commitment to best-in-class excellence, following Misha Bilenko’s hiring in February to head our Machine Intelligence and Research division. Over the next year, Yan will be working to further develop the Yandex.Cloud vision as well as build out the Yandex.Cloud team. While Yandex initially plans to focus Yandex.Cloud for the local market, we hope to broaden our reach to businesses across globe in the future.