Newly expanded leadership reflects a growing need to accelerate and simplify API development and governance for rapid growth

August 15, 2024

TORONTO—Buf, the first end-to-end developer platform for Protocol Buffers and gRPC, today announced that Clinton Ford, the former Unravel Data product marketing leader, has joined Buf. This expanded leadership position will support the company’s continued growth and follows Buf's recent Bufstream announcement.

“Rising demand for emerging technologies and use cases is increasing the urgency for consistent and reliable APIs and governance to support a growing appetite for relevant data,” said Buf Head of DevRel, Derek Perez. “Schema-driven API development enables broader participation in the fast-growing data economy. Buf helps organizations create, connect, and govern APIs across cloud and toolchain silos to fuel the growth of modern apps and intelligence platforms.”

Ford brings over 20 years of experience in product development, product management, and product marketing, as well as an extensive knowledge of cloud data platforms and public cloud providers—specifically, how they enable business value through the reliability and scale required for emerging technologies. Before joining Buf, Ford was Vice President of Product Marketing for Unravel. He has also served as Principal Product Marketing Manager for Databricks, where he was responsible for building the company’s cloud partner marketing strategy and driving exponential growth, leveraging cloud partner platform capabilities and marketing channels. Earlier in his career, he worked for Microsoft and AWS, where he launched new data + AI services and held positions of increasing responsibility.

“As organizations today build and manage thousands of APIs across their environments, they need consistency, reliability, and compatibility to meet their development, operations, and governance needs,” said Ford. “I’m excited to be part of the Buf team to address the need for faster and more reliable ways to build and deploy APIs for new use cases. Customers are leveraging Buf’s platform to deliver valuable APIs, increase business resilience, and simplify integration across teams to accelerate growth.”

Buf was born from the realization that the challenges of freeform API development can be overcome through a schema-based design approach. Customers who have deployed Buf have revolutionized how they deliver consistency across platforms, enable finer-grained control, and boost developer efficiency. Buf provides these benefits to customers by collaborating closely with the developer community and partners, including cloud service providers, developer platforms, and independent software vendors, to enable integrations like the Buf GitHub Action, Bazel, TanStack Query, Kong, and the Buf Connect RPC project, which recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

To learn more about how development teams tackle some of today’s most complex API issues with Buf, please visit https://buf.build/. See how Buf helps overcome the most common API development and governance challenges by reading recent blog posts and viewing demonstration videos on YouTube here.

About Buf

Buf accelerates and transforms API development and deployment by helping organizations manage API proliferation, scale streaming data, and integrate complex applications through schema-driven APIs and Protobuf-first data governance. Buf accelerates gRPC adoption with the Buf Schema Registry and Bufstream, built by the world's Protobuf experts. To learn more, visit https://buf.build.