Bob Muglia

Bob Muglia is a veteran American technology executive best known for leading Snowflake Computing through the formative years that turned it into the dominant cloud data-warehouse company, and for a 23-year career at Microsoft that saw him run some of its largest server and enterprise divisions. Born in Connecticut in 1959, Muglia studied at the University of Michigan before beginning his career at ROLM Corporation.

Muglia joined Microsoft in 1988 and spent more than two decades climbing its management ranks, starting as the first product manager for SQL Server. He went on to lead the Windows NT division, the Servers and Tools business, and eventually the company's Enterprise Storage and Windows Server divisions, ultimately becoming president of Servers and Tools — a unit that grew to represent more than a fifth of Microsoft's total revenue by 2009. He testified in the landmark United States v. Microsoft antitrust case before resigning from the company in January 2011.

After Microsoft, Muglia served as executive vice-president of Juniper Networks' software division from 2011 to 2013. In June 2014 he became chief executive of Snowflake Computing, then an early-stage startup, and spent nearly five years building the company's technology, team and go-to-market strategy around a cloud-native, separated-storage-and-compute architecture for data warehousing. He stepped down as CEO in April 2019, handing the reins to Frank Slootman, who took Snowflake public later that year in one of the largest software IPOs in history.

Since leaving Snowflake, Muglia has remained closely engaged with the data industry as an investor, board member and adviser. In 2020 he was named chairman of Fauna, a serverless document database startup founded by former Twitter engineers, backing the company's $27 million funding round and helping guide its strategy as demand grew for globally distributed, developer-friendly databases.

Muglia has continued to speak and write widely on data architecture and the enterprise software business, drawing on a career that spans the client-server era at Microsoft, the rise of cloud infrastructure at Juniper, and the birth of the modern cloud data-warehouse category at Snowflake — giving him a rare, multi-decade vantage point on how enterprises have stored and analysed their data.