Parente has an engineering background and began his AT&T career as a design architect. In business school, he learned to “put the customer first,” he says. “Before, I put the technology first.” Having worked at AT&T since 1997, he’s impressed by the company’s history of innovation, and looks forward to blogging about PaaS as it applies to the enterprise: how it can reduce costs, increase time to market and innovate new services by leveraging an “instant-on” resource.

When asked what his favorite out-dated technology is, Parente answers, “My cast iron frying pan.” He likes to cook, and lists his top culinary feats as braising meats and pancakes. Parente likens a fully stocked kitchen to PaaS. “I like cooking, but I don’t like shopping or cleaning,” he explains. PaaS, he says, isn’t unlike walking into a fully stocked kitchen, putting together a dish with ingredients that are already there and ready to use, and then “walking away” with a finished meal: No clean up, no restocking, no turning appliances off. Just use what you need, cook what you want and go.

While he intends to blog about cloud computing and how “we’re on the cusp of forever changing” IT, Parente admits he might break form and “blog my pancake recipe.”