Chris C. Kemp

Chris C. Kemp
At NASA in 2008
Born	Buffalo, New York
Nationality	United States
Employer	Nebula, Inc.
Title	Founder and Chief Strategy Officer

Chris C. Kemp (born Buffalo, New York) is an American information technology executive. His career included leading IT at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and as NASA’s first chief technology officer (CTO) for IT. Kemp is known for his role in OpenStack, an open source software project for cloud computing. He was a founder of Nebula, a company which tried to commercialize the technology, from 2011 to 2015.

While studying Computer Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he founded Netran, a company that operated an online grocery shopping service for Kroger. Kemp served as CEO and president of Netran from 1997 to 2000. At the age of 21, Kemp sold his first business and joined Classmates.com as its chief architect. In 2002, Kemp founded Escapia, after trying to rent a beach house on the Internet. Kemp served as CEO and president of Escapia from 2002-2006. Escapia was sold to HomeAway in 2010.

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.

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