Willem van Biljon

Willem van Biljon
Born	29 December 1961 Pretoria, South Africa
Residence	Cape Town, South Africa
Alma mater	University of Cape Town
Occupation	Co-CEO takealot.com

Willem van Biljon (born 1961) is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in South Africa.

Van Biljon graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Computer Science. He held engineering and research positions at LinkData, the Institute for Applied Computer Science and the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Van Biljon co-founded Mosaic Software.^[1] Mosaic built the Postilion payment system, the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems (Windows). Mosaic's investors included GE and Paul Maritz.^[2] The company became one of the top three payment processing software vendors in the world and was sold in 2004 to S1 Corp.^[3][4]

Van Biljon was at Amazon.com where, along with Chris Pinkham and Christopher Brown led the team that developed Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Willem built the business plan for the service and was responsible for product management and marketing for the public cloud service.^{[5][6][7][8] [9]}

In 2006, van Biljon left Amazon Web Services and later started a venture with Chris Pinkham. The company, Nimbula, was focused on Cloud Computing software and was funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.^[10][11] In March 2013, Nimbula was acquired by Oracle Corporation.^[12]

In April 2014 van Biljon joined takealot.com, a Cape Town based ecommerce company as Co-CEO and CTO.

Van Biljon co-authored two patent applications: "Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes",^[13] "Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems".^[14]

Publications

• M. Hirsch, S. R. Schach, and W. R. van Biljon, "High-Level Debugging Systems for Pascal: Interpreter versus Compiler," Quaest. Informaticae 3 (3) (Aug. 1985), 9-13.
• Van Biljon WR, "A geographic database system", Proceedings Auto Carto 8, Baltimore USA, pp 689–700, March 1987.
• Van Biljon WR, "Towards a fuzzy mathematical model of data quality in a GIS", Proceedings EDIS '87 Conference, Pretoria SA, 11 pp, September 1987.
• W. R. Van Biljon, D. A. Sewry, and M. A. Mulders. "Register allocation in a pattern matching code generator." Software: Practice & Experience, 17(8):521–531, August 1987.
• van Biljon, WR, "Extending Petri Nets for Specifying Man-Machine Dialogues", Int. J. Man-Machine Studies, Vol. 28, pages 437-455. 1988.

References

1. "Mosaic Software selects Stratus for its EFT software solution". July 2001.
2. "Former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz invests in Mosaic Software.". 8 Oct 2001.
3. "S1 to Buy Mosaic to Add ATM Channel to Front-Office Suite". 9 Nov 2004.
4. "S1 To Acquire Financial Transaction Solution, Add ATM Channel to Complete Integrated Front-Office Suite". 9 Nov 2004.
5. "Amazon opens Cape software centre". 19 July 2005.
6. "Amazon opens dev centre in Cape Town". 20 July 2005.
7. "Amazon's Pinkham quits". 29 November 2006.
8. "Amazon’s early efforts at cloud computing? Partly accidental". 17 June 2010.
9. "The Origins of Amazon's Cloud Computing". 18 June 2010.
10. Amazon EC2 creator launches private cloud start-up
11. "Nimbula Secures $15 Million Venture Capital Investment".
12. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/nimbula/index.html
13. "Patent page on WIPO website".
14. "Patent page on WIPO website".