Tom Keane

For more than two decades, Tom Keane has developed revolutionary products, fostered innovation, and built and led exceptional teams. His leadership has focused on delivering results, encouraging entrepreneurship, and boosting new businesses. In his career as a senior executive at Microsoft, he’s become a leading voice on digital transformation, cloud computing, and other technologies that have revolutionized how we live and work.

Tom Keane is the corporate vice president, head of product and engineering, for Microsoft.
He oversees a team that’s developing new products and services involving areas such as autonomy, space ground, and communications. Other focus spaces include 5G, analytics and augmented intelligence, secure data access, and data movement.

Keane believes in digital sovereignty, the concept that parties have control of their digital footprint. He works closely with others worldwide to minimize risk and defend against digital threats.
Tom Keane attended the University of South Australia, where he studied computer science. He began his career as a software engineer for Intec Consulting Group in Adelaide, Australia, before joining Microsoft in 2001. He has lived and worked in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

He’s led teams at Microsoft responsible for solving some of its most complex and high-profile challenges. His expertise ranges from cloud computing and cybersecurity to product development and digital sovereignty. He frequently advises the company’s senior leadership team and gives presentations to its board of directors.

His track record at the company speaks for itself, with numerous new products that have delivered considerable value to Microsoft. His teams have become renowned for their engineering mastery, operational excellence, diversity, and commitment to some of Microsoft’s largest customers.

In 2021, WashingtonExec named Tom Keane the Cloud Industry Executive of the Year at its Pinnacle Awards.

His work for the U.S. government in recent years is particularly notable. Since early 2020, his teams have worked to develop Azure Government and Azure Government Top Secret cloud solutions. These two new cloud solutions mean Microsoft provides full-spectrum support for U.S. government data.

His teams worked on launching a suite of edge devices designed to connect those in some of the world’s most remote regions. This connectivity helps support missions ranging from disaster response to national security.

In addition, Tom Keane’s group worked with 10 companies to support the U.S. Department of Defense. The project involved creating a secure design process for microelectronics in the United States. It’s designed to enhance the manufacturing base by supporting emerging technologies such as 5G communications, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.

Collectively, his leadership has helped change the cloud paradigm for Microsoft’s U.S. government customers. The work he led has provided more choices to address government entities’ workload issues. It’s also addressed and solved key compliance and security issues around national security and sensitive data.

During his 20-plus-year career at Microsoft, Tom Keane has led some of the company’s most critical projects.

Tom Keane has been instrumental in the development and growth of Microsoft Azure. He was responsible for the cloud solution’s global infrastructure, horizontal engineering, and new product lines.

He oversaw a massive global expansion of Azure, representing 83% of the world’s gross domestic product. He introduced Azure as the first hyperscale cloud in China and the first cloud in continental Africa.

He also led demand planning, technical architecture, and Azure’s foundation for customers and Microsoft products built on Azure.

The Azure infrastructure under Tom Keane’s leadership is considerable. Azure now has gigawatts of capacity and hundreds of data centers. He led the development of data center hardware, software, and network paradigms that provide high levels of availability and resiliency.

He also led the regulatory compliance program for Azure. He worked with over 100 governments and regulators globally to create cyber policy and sovereignty that supports cloud adoption.
Tom Keane was a founding member of the Office 365 engineering team. He oversaw key product areas, including infrastructure and user experience. He helped scale the service to more than 110 million end-users and 80,000 customers.

He led the company’s Vanguard initiative, a companywide project that involved more than 500 teams and 15,000 engineers. The project tackled some of the firm’s most critical challenges and opportunities. Often, these projects involved complex, highly visible work in regulatory and media spaces.

Tom Keane led engineering teams responsible for addressing Microsoft’s response to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data privacy rules. He also guided work for the company’s response to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure solicitation.