Yahoo’s New Application VP

news.com has an article about Yahoo’s new application VP, Bryan Lamkin.

Yahoo hires former Adobe exec to lead applications group

by Jennifer Guevin

• Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo has hired Bryan Lamkin to head up the group that manages some of its highest-profile products and is an essential element of the Yahoo Open Strategy.

Lamkin will take on the role of senior vice president of Yahoo's Applications Products division, which encompasses its e-mail and instant messaging services, photo-hosting site Flickr, as well as Yahoo Answers, Groups, and e-mail and calendar service Zimbra. He will report directly to Executive Vice President of Products and Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh.

As part of its Yahoo Open Strategy, the company is attempting to better integrate social connections with its online applications.

His role will be a central one at Yahoo in light of a recent reorganization led by CEO Carol Bartz, which unified Yahoo's product and technology groups under Balogh. Bartz said Tuesday she was dissatisfied with the unfocused engineering work at Yahoo and called for a new round of layoffs, in part to make room for new engineering talent.

Yahoo has been reducing data center costs along with the rest of the top players as data center knowledge reported.

Q&A: Yahoo Discusses Its Data Centers

October 6th, 2008 : Rich Miller

Search and news portal Yahoo (YHOO) is a major user of data center space, and is in the midst of a significant expansion of its infrastructure. We recently had an email Q-and-A with Yahoo Vice President of Operations Kevin Timmons, who oversees the company’s data centers, and asked about Yahoo’s data center growth and energy efficiency initiatives.

&lta href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=abe8c1f2&ampamp;cb=767963705' target='_blank'>&ltimg src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=3201&ampamp;n=abe8c1f2' border='0' alt='' /></a>

What are the factors prompting Yahoo to seek additional data center space?

We’re constantly in expansion mode here, primarily due to simple traffic growth to the site and our efforts to continuously serve our global audience in the best manner possible. We also are continuously looking to consolidate many of our smaller legacy centers into more efficiently designed facilities that are more reliable and more cost effective to operate.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Bryan when he was a VP at Adobe and was curious what he was going to do after his retirement from Adobe in 2006. Hopefully it will not be long before I can get in contact with Bryan in his new role at Yahoo.