Cole Crawford
Cole Crawford is CEO and founder of Vapor IO, the creators of the Kinetic Edge™ platform. Vapor IO is the leading provider of edge colocation, edge networking and edge interconnection services. Cole has been a thought leader in the data center technology and edge computing industry for over a decade. Cole is a founding board member of the Open19 Foundation, the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project Foundation and co-founder of OpenStack. He and Vapor IO are currently leading industry efforts to deliver the first fully-integrated hardware and software platform for edge colocation, exchange and networking services for autonomous data center operations and application telemetry.
Cole is leading Vapor IO in developing the largest nationwide edge colocation and interconnection platform at the edge of the wireless cellular network. Serving the world’s largest wireless carriers, cloud providers, web-scale companies and other innovative enterprises, Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge combines multi-tenant colocation with software-defined interconnection and high-speed networking. The Kinetic Edge delivers the most flexible, highly-distributed edge infrastructure at the edge of the wireless network.
Vapor IO is a founding member of the LF Edge and has been the primary contributor to the Open Glossary of Edge Computing. Cole is a strong open source advocate and believes The LF Edge framework of projects will help organizations build edge applications more quickly and with more interoperability.
Cole is a sought after speaker at industry conferences globally, Forbes contributor and has been named to Data Economy’s list of The World’s Most Influential Data Economy Leaders and The World’s First Top 50 Edge Computing Influencers.