Scott Houston

Scott Houston is a New Zealand technology entrepreneur best known as the founder of GreenButton, a Wellington-based high-performance cloud computing company acquired by Microsoft in 2014.

Houston’s path to GreenButton ran through the film industry. As chief technology officer of Weta Digital, the visual effects studio behind The Lord of the Rings, he had overseen the enormous render farm used to bring Middle-earth to the screen. When production wound down, he was left with hundreds of powerful processors sitting idle and a question: what if that kind of computing capacity could be leased on demand, by anyone who needed it? It was a cloud-computing idea before the cloud, as we know it, existed.

Founded in 2006 as InterGrid and later renamed GreenButton, the company helped independent software vendors and enterprises run compute-intensive workloads without owning expensive infrastructure. Its technology supported demanding use cases across science, engineering, media and finance, powering tools such as Pixar’s RenderMan in the cloud and it earned recognition as Microsoft’s Windows Azure ISV Partner of the Year.

GreenButton’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2014 marked an important moment for New Zealand’s technology sector. Its technology was integrated into Microsoft Azure — becoming part of what is now Azure Batch, proving that New Zealand-built cloud infrastructure could contribute to one of the world’s largest technology platforms.

Houston’s work stands out because it was early. Long before cloud computing became routine business infrastructure, GreenButton was helping organisations understand and harness it for serious workloads.

His story adds a valuable layer to New Zealand’s innovation history, a reminder that some of the country’s most important technology companies are not consumer-facing at all. Some quietly build the infrastructure that lets entire industries work faster, smarter and at greater scale.

Sources: ITnews · Movac · Wikipedia