• CERAWEEK 2025 | March 10-14, 2025
  • CERAWEEK
  • March 10 - 14, 2025

Bill Vass

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Vice President of Engineering

Bill Vass is Vice President of Engineering at Amazon Web Services. In this role, Bill oversees more than 42 cloud and edge technologies that allow AWS’ customers to store, analyze, manage, and retrieve information quickly and efficiently. Bill’s teams deploy, manage, and monitor the cloud. They provide large scale storage; support gaming, large scale simulations, and studio rendering; provide data transfer and real time streaming services; lead AWS’ product development into the Internet of Things (IoT); create robotics and autonomous systems; support the Snowball Edge processing device systems; and lead AWS’ research and development into quantum computing. In short, his teams develop and operate the largest software defined storage, streaming, IoT, automated management, and monitoring systems in the world, used by web-based companies, consumer companies, enterprises, and governments. Before joining AWS, Mr. Vass was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Liquid Robotics, Inc., a pioneering Data as a Service, cloud-based solutions company that designs and builds autonomous robots that serve a wide range of customers in the energy, shipping, defense, communications, scientific, intelligence, and environmental markets. Prior to that, Mr. Vass was the President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, an independent subsidiary of Sun Microsystems with its own board of directors, where he was responsible for growing over $1.4B of revenue. His responsibilities spanned Product Development, Sales and Business Development, Marketing, Partner Management, and Service Delivery. Before his role leading Sun Microsystems Federal, Mr. Vass served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Sun, where he defined and delivered the technology vision and architecture while he managed global deployments in support of Sun’s 50K business users. During his time as CIO, Mr. Vass significantly improved security, availability, and application delivery while reducing the overall operations cost of IT from $880M to $360M. Mr. Vass had a lengthy public service career. Working for the Secretary of Defense in the Office of the CIO, he was on a team responsible the for oversight of a $35.5B budget, as well as system and software acquisition, research, development, and integration standards for over 6,800 IT systems. His organization managed networks, servers and applications across the Pentagon’s defense networks. Prior to joining the Office of the CIO, Mr. Vass was CTO and technical lead for the U.S. Army’s personnel systems worldwide. Before his work at the DoD, Mr. Vass developed large-scale commercial Information Technology engineering and business systems solutions for defense system integrators, as well as the oil and gas and ocean engineering industries.

Sessions With Bill Vass

Monday, 9 March

  • 03:20pm - 04:05pm (CST) / -

    Plenary - Digital Transformation: Driving sustainable operations
    Clean Tech Innovation & Technology

    The energy industry faces more complex challenges than ever, some of them existential. Technological advancements plus business drivers and models, make up the foundation of a massive digital transformation, with industry applying a tremendous amount of resources to it. At a time of increased complexity, profitability pressures, and a constrained carbon future, this digital transformation will be crucial to business growth and profit but must also be sustainable. How is digital transformation measured and where is the industry along this path? Where are the big successes coming from? Do they stand on their own or are they part of a larger, integrated, sustainable ecosystem? How does a successful digital strategy come together for an energy company and are the gains sustainable? 

Tuesday, 10 March

  • 09:30am - 10:20am (CST) / -

    Democratizing Data
    Upstream Oil & Gas Digitalization

    With advanced computing power and the increased use of digital technologies, the energy industry’s technical and commercial disciplines are de-siloing and democratizing their data, shaping the energy company of the future. Rallying to the “future is open” call, all levels of an organization—not just IT or data science teams—are enabled to solve problems using open access to data and analytical tools. In the process, traditional corporate structures evolve, and new models of change management are created. How can data-literate individuals add value to corporate decision making? What does data governance and integrity look like in this new reality of “data openness”? What are the benefits of global, industry-wide open data access, including lidar, GHGSat (methane emissions monitoring), and Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU)?