Chris C. Kemp is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Nebula, Inc., a cloud computing company that offers an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) OpenStack cloud system
Prior to founding Nebula, Kemp was NASA’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for IT. He also served as Chief Information Officer and Director of Strategic Business Development at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA. Kemp co-founded OpenStack, an open- source cloud project with the goal of enabling any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. After his departure NASA concluded that Nebula was a waste of agency resources and was technological inferior to similar offerings from the private sector.
Kemp joined NASA in 2006 as Director of Strategic Business Development at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley where he helped forge a partnership with Google. In 2007, he was appointed Chief Information Officer (CIO) making him responsible for most of the IT infrastructure at NASA Ames (networks, datacenters, systems, etc.), and several NASA-wide services, including the NASA Security Operations Center (SOC). As CIO, Kemp established a partnership with Microsoft.
Unlike traditional government procurements, where the government gave money to private companies, Kemp structured unique public-private partnerships with both Google and Microsoft that provided his team at NASA millions of dollars of funding to offset the costs of making vast amounts of data available in Google Earth and Microsoft Worldwide Telescope.