Inaugural OpenStack Silicon Valley Conference Draws 590 Attendees from Open Cloud Community

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Sept. 19, 2014 – Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, hosted the inaugural OpenStack Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on September 16, 2014. More than 590 attendees gathered at the sold-out event, including more than a dozen analysts and journalists from Gartner, IDC, 451 Research, SiliconANGLE, eWeek, TechTarget, Web Host Industry Review, The New Stack, and GigaOm.

An A-list roster of speakers shared insights with the OpenStack community, including:

• Eucalyptus CEO (soon to be senior vice president and general manager of HP’s cloud business) Marten Mickos, who spoke about his goal of “total victory for open source.”

• HP EVP and CTO Martin Fink, who reiterated Hewlett-Packard’s commitment to OpenStack, and discussed why HP bought Eucalyptus.

• OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce, who stated that “nothing kills innovation like having to submit a ticket,” meaning that innovation needs to happen faster if vendors want to maintain their customer base.

• VMware CTO of Networking Martin Casado, who analyzed what was meant by “policy” and what engineers need to do in order to leverage technology to implement the agendas of non-technical professionals.

• Cloudscaling CEO and Founder Randy Bias, who attacked the notion that OpenStack needs a “benevolent dictator” like Linux and emphasised the need for an OpenStack product strategy.

• Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel, who explored what developers really care about: a focus on APIs, interoperability and central planning that is advisory, not compulsory.

OpenStack Silicon Valley was sponsored by companies across the OpenStack ecosystem: A10 Networks, Blue Box Cloud, Blue Chip Tek, Inc., Brocade Communications Systems, Cisco Systems, Inc., Cloudscaling Group, Inc., DreamHost, GigaSpaces Technologies, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, Juniper Networks, Nebula, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Piston Cloud Computing, PLUMgrid, Tesora, Scality, SolidFire, StackVelocity, SwiftStack, Ubuntu and VMware, Inc.

“A whole series of organizations, many of whom are ordinarily competitors, came together to sponsor, discuss, and promote OpenStack,” said Mirantis CMO and co-founder, Boris Renski. “The event’s success is thanks to everyone who attended, from our superb speakers who took time out to share their insights, to our sponsors, to first-time attendees learning the ropes of the OpenStack ecosystem.”