Frank Ambrose was announced as the new Head of Global Technology for Second Life today. Formerly at AOL, Frank was “in the engine room” but a few snippets from past interviews and statements give some sense of why Linden Lab was attracted to Frank and his skill set.

IT Supporting Strategy at AOL
Frank Ambrose was interviewed a number of years (2006) ago by a Washington radio show, and it may give some insight into his experience and approach to issues that he faced at AOL and that he may face with Second Life.

Frank was involved at the time Google took a billion dollar stake in AOL. In responding to the deal, he commented, and while much of it focused on AOL strategy, it’s sort of interesting to imagine these as responses to a job interview with M and Philip:

On shifting from platform to advertising:
“I think that the Google partnership was something that was important to us because we had a partnership with Google for quite a while and enhancing that partnership with this deal was really key to the overall startegy that we have to really get into the advertising market in a big way and really help to sort of offset the decline in subscription revenues that we’re getting.”

On search:
“I think one of the things as a company that we seem to be strategically trying to do is leverage partnerships and acquisitions so AOL search can be a much better tool for our membership….tie all of these pieces together in a sort of aggregated use.”

On the role in IT supporting strategy:
“From an operations stand point we’re the guys in the engine room, so we just need to make sure everything works. But when you see these kinds of arrangements you can really piece together a clear picture of the company’s strategy. For the folks who are out there just making things work it really becomes a satisfying experience…to help redirect the company, continue to seek growth in the company. People are very excited about the buzz that’s come back.”

Interoperability and Identity
Ambrose was also heavily involved in the Concordia Project, which was looking towards solutions for interoperability of identity management systems.

As he commented about the project:

“AOL is very happy to be part of the Concordia Project,” says Frank Ambrose, Senior Vice President of AOL’s Technology Infrastructure. “We are committed to open and interoperable identity solutions and we want consumers to be able to manage their identities easily and effortlessly. Doing so requires us to support a wide range of identity solutions and protocols, ranging from ultra-private to ultra-open, and everything in between - we want this range to be transparent to our consumers, allowing them to ‘just do what they want to do’ without thinking about the protocols enabling the transactions and activities in the background. We’re eager to work collectively with the industry and develop the necessary solutions to help our customers manage their identities, seamlessly.”

With the focus at the Lab recently on interoperability with openSim and their effort to define the standards for virtual worlds, this will be an asset to the Lab. I don’t imagine a much different quote from LL about the work of the Architecture Working Group.