Who is Alex Fielding?
Alex Fielding is CEO and co-founder of Ripcord, the first robotic digitization company in the world. His leadership role makes him responsible for the company’s vision and execution.
Fielding has spent most of his career working on projects that involve the development of communications and networking products as well as advanced research to fulfill his passions: security, energy efficiency, the power of data, and helping to inspire and educate the workforce of the future.
Alex Fielding’s Background and Career
He began his career working at Cisco Systems and then worked at Apple as an engineer, where he was employed from 1996 to 1999. During his three years at Apple, Fielding worked on numerous projects and multiple generations of the PowerBook, MacOS, and Network server and he was also a part of the very first iMac team.
Soon after he departed from Apple, in 1999, Fielding worked at Exodus Communications, with the former CTO of Apple, Ellen Hancock, then Exodus CEO (with whom he would go on to work with extensively). Exodus was an ISP and Internet host that grew to 5.1 million square feet and 47 data centers, hosting the world’s largest brick-and-mortar and dot com businesses. Alex held several different roles at the company, starting with Senior Staff Engineer. He was then promoted to West Coast Manager of the “Platinum Network Engineering & Support program,” where he and his team were responsible for the hands-on support and customer satisfaction of the company’s biggest customers while maintaining the organization’s worldwide operations.
Alex later got his first role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2001 at Tri-Valley Data Centers, an East Bay colocation and data center company.
After that, also in 2001, Alex Fielding co-founded his first business, “Wheels of Zeus,” with Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak. The venture was funded by DFJ and Mobius. It developed GPS locator technology that tracked critical assets like pets and people. In 2006, the company was acquired by Zontrak.
Fielding moved on to the position of CTO of Federal and Vice President of Business Development at Power Assure, starting in 2009. At Power Assure, Fielding developed solutions for the U.S. Government and generated a global partner strategy working with the organization's largest partners, including ABB, Dell, Intel, VMWare, UL, Cisco, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raritan, Universal Electric, IBM, and Dominion.
Power Assure's technology and platform allowed data center operators to make applications completely portable, and increase reliability and availability. To do so, resource availability and computing load utilization were directly tied across logical, physical, and virtual infrastructures. The company received a Department of Energy grant of $5M and won the Red Herring 100, Clean Tech Open Data Center Europe Award three times for Change & Innovation.
In addition, during his time with Power Assure and after, from 2010 to 2015, Fielding worked with NASA as a direct contractor to facilitate a Power Assure deployment across 87 NASA data centers, while also working on data center consolidation technology with NASA's OCIO.
From 2011 to 2014, Alex served as an Advisor to the CTO at Piston Cloud Computing, where he started working with the team at NASA Ames before the partnership between NASA and RackSpace launched OpenStack. The company was later sold to Cisco.
During that time, from 2013 to 2014, Alex also served as Vice President of the Federal & Energy department at Vigilant, a cooling company.
Alex Fielding is on the Board of Directors at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) and a Board Member of the Code Warriors Foundation, along with a founding member of the Singularity University.
