Bruce Runyan, a 20-year veteran in the technology sector, joined Mosso on Tuesday as chief uptime officer and according to the company's announcement will be responsible for "ensuring that Mosso continues to provide a reliable customer experience as the cloud scales, and create an environment that enables Mosso to introduce new capabilities and capacity without impacting the experience."

While filling a job position isn't particularly unique news, what's unusual about this announcement is that Mosso decided to create an entirely new job title and hand-picked the various engineering, operations and service duties this individual would be responsible for, with the ultimate goal of ensuring Mosso is able to meet its 100 percent uptime service level agreement, 100 percent of the time.

The company says the essence of this new role at Mosso is not necessarily all about the consolidation of functions, however, but more about focus and prioritization of activities.

In an email interview with theWHIR, Runyan expanded on the types of duties he'll be responsible for under his new role and why more cloud computing service providers should consider hiring their own CUO.

Obviously promising reliable uptime isn't a new thing for Mosso and meeting its 100 percent uptime SLA is paramount, but why did Mosso decide to dedicate a single person to this specific responsibility of "uptime"? And why did this garner a new job title?

Bruce Runyan: The cloud is all about delivering on the promise of service availability, reliability, and consistency - which we express as high uptime. If technology works as expected, whenever it is needed, then it develops customer trust.

To first establish, and then maintain, this trust in the cloud requires not only solid engineering and operational excellence, but also re-thinking services and interactions that create the true customer experience. This requires a holistic view, encompassing what people are doing with the cloud, what they expect their experience to be, and ultimately how well our services align with these expectations.

Maintaining focus and delivering high levels of uptime are clear prerequisites to meeting these expectations, and developing this trust. Everyone at Mosso is involved with uptime, it is my job as chief uptime officer to focus those efforts.

Who would the duties of this CUO have fallen on previously (according to more "traditional" job titles)?

BR: The more traditional approach would be to have engineering and operations functions with shared goals and dependent objectives. Engineering focuses on complex problems, resulting in products and operations focuses upon providing services based upon these products. Service is delivered within agreed SLAs, and provided in a cost effective manner.

Rackspace and Mosso have become very accomplished in executing under this model. However, our experience tells us that as the cloud scales, the environment becomes more dynamic and unpredictable at a micro level, while simultaneously more predictable at a macro level. Since real customers live and experience the micro effects, traditional approaches become increasingly ineffective.

How will having a CUO improve Mosso's services and give the company an advantage over competitors?

BR: In the case of cloud environments, perfect product and perfect execution are not sufficient to create the perfect experience. Delivering upon customer expectations in a defined, controlled environment, such as hosting, is a fairly well understood problem. It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a mature service environment. Being able to meet or exceed individual customer expectations, while simultaneously delivering consistent services that reliably scale on demand, is the cloud challenge. This is a combination of mature and emerging technology, interacting in undefined and less predictable ways.

The CUO position demonstrates Mosso's acknowledgment of the imperative to maintain clear focus on the customer experience, not just the technical and operational aspects, while the environment evolves. This is more than a symbolic gesture, and is a clear commitment at the highest level to focus upon creating and maintaining trust in the cloud.

What is your strategy for running a "zero downtime" cloud environment for Mosso?

BR: Initially we will continue with the current combination of expanding upon what is already working well, and introducing minimalist process and analytics into the equation to strengthen reliability and consistency.

I believe that success in managing the cloud environments is more aligned with real-time process control, and emergency response excellence, than simply monitoring large distributed datacenter environments. The basics of large scale service management must be there to get into the game, monitor capacity and keep ahead of demand, but the additional process control and fast response discipline is required as well. This implies rapid analytics, profiling, and higher levels of automation with real-time feedback loops - in addition to the core strengths of traditional global service management.

This is presumably the first time someone has been appointed to the role of a chief uptime officer. However, Mosso seems to believe that every cloud provider should eventually have one. Why?

BR: At the moment, the cloud still represents a technology transition into somewhat uncharted territory. Ultimately, cloud technology will mature and we will see generalists, we will see specialists, and we will see hybrid models emerge.

Today, your desktop works, your network works, your IP addressing and security works, your back offices systems interoperate, SaaS is commonplace, and IP telephony works. Not that long ago, each of these technologies was new, untested, immature, and with nonexistent interoperability between vendors, let alone agreed standards. Turn on your laptop now, and these things just work.

Tomorrow, the cloud will be added to this list. The path to get there will require clear alignment with customer expectations, and establishing customer trust, which begins with uptime.