Cloud governance and management company enStratus made two big hires in the past week: John Willis and James Urquhart, the new VP of Product Strategy.

Willis is well known in DevOps circles and previously worked for Opscode and the DevOps consulting firm DTO Solutions. Yesterday, Willis announced on Twitter that he would start on enStratus today.

Urquhart writes the “Wisdom of Clouds” column for CNET and worked for Cisco. He kicked off a massive guessing game last Friday when Chrisopher Hoff broke the news of Urquhart’s resignation from Cisco on Twitter, but Urquhart declined to announce where he was going until the end of the day. He finally revealed that he was joining enStratus. Urquhart emphasized that this wasn’t a vote of “no confidence” in Cisco, but a “phenomenal opportunity.”

Services Angle

SiliconAngle founder John Furrier has been saying that data governance will be one of the next big things. It may not sound exciting, but with the proliferation of cloud services and the explosion of data, managing where data travels and who has access to it where is becoming both more important and more difficult. There will be big rewards for those who can solve these problems. That such well known and respected industry names are joining enStratus is a validation of this view.