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Former Mac OS X Chief Quietly Building Cloud Startup

Bertrand Serlet, the man widely considered the wizard behind the Mac operating-system-curtain, is reportedly working on his own cloud system, Business Insider said today.

June 29, 2012

Bertrand Serlet, the man widely considered to be the wizard behind the Mac operating system curtain, is reportedly working on his own cloud system, Business Insider said today.

Serlet, along with at least two other former Apple employees, are working in Palo Alto on startup Upthere, but the team is staying mum about company details.

The former chief of Mac software engineering in March 2011 after 22 years with the company. At the time, Apple said Serlet wanted "to focus less on products and more on science."

He was replaced at Apple by former vice president of Mac Software Engineering Craig Federighi.

For the past year, Serlet has been putting his science skills to the test building Upthere, a "cloud hosting provider" that offers consulting services in the field of cloud computing," according to the initial trademark request, filed in September.

Business Insider cited design engineer job postings that surfaced in late 2011, when Upthere described itself "as being an early stage startup looking to build a cloud storage feature, with seven employees on staff."

One job posting mentioned that the company's founders were "key to building the world's leading operating system (Mac OS X) and database (Oracle)," referencing Serlet and Roger Bodamer, a former vice president of product operations and development at Apple who previously worked at Oracle, Business Insider reported.

Former Apple user interface designer and Mint employee Justin Maxwell tipped Business Insider off earlier this month via his LinkedIn profile, which led to a tweet from Maxwell naming Serlet and Bodamer as company partners.

As more and more cloud operations crop up, Upthere will have to contend with existent services like Dropbox and Apple's iCloud.

The Upthere website currently provides nothing but the company logo.