OpenStack Mitaka Design Summit

Our panel of APAC-based venture capitalists will discuss the growth of OpenStack across Asia, with a focus on startups developing technology within the OpenStack ecosystem. 

Our panelists will share their personal criteria for evaluating startups to fund, and provide insight to problems not yet addressed within OpenStack today, i.e. opportunities for the next wave of open-source software enthusiasts and entrepreneurs.

Drawing on real-world stories of success (and the occasional stumble), they will answer questions about how OpenStack is being used by industry to reduce cost and time-to-market, as well as about new business opportunities created by OpenStack.

Finally, our panelists will look at the new communities and ecosystems emerging around the OpenStack core.

In the early days of OpenStack—think Diablo and Essex—smart people had a great idea: let’s simplify OpenStack consumption by offering a choice in between the polar opposites of build it yourself (DIY) and a Rackspace account.

And thus, the OpenStack software distribution was born. Startups and legacy IT shops spent the next 4 years trying to convince a skeptical market that distros were the way to go, but it hasn’t worked out. With a couple of exceptions, distros are vanishing from the competitive landscape.

In this session, we’ll look at what happened. We’ll examine the reasons why very few enterprises want to learn or operate OpenStack, but remain hungry to *consume* it. We’ll ask why most enterprise buyers want OpenStack without having to touch OpenStack. We’ll look at the mindset of enterprises that “get” agile and realize their success rests solely on differentiation through application innovation, not through an investment in infrastructure and operations. Finally, we’ll look at some of the places where innovation is happening in the OpenStack ecosystem and how new business models are emerging.

Attend this session if you agree, disagree or simply want to have an honest conversation about what we can learn from the demise of one of the early favorites in OpenStack business models.

OpenStack is like an Orchestra, made up of many different instruments each playing different parts that come together to form an open source masterpiece.  The next wave of OpenStack companies are a set of specialists who are becoming masters at their own instrument.  In this panel, we will have one of the virtuosos of the first wave of OpenStack startups, Boris Renski, Co-founder and CMO of Mirantis, acting as conductor.  He will be directing an all-star ensemble of instrumentalists from companies specializing in projects that harmonize to form the OpenStack symphony.

The first wave of OpenStack startups were generalists delivering a complete OpenStack solutions.  Many of these have now been acquired by larger companies, for example Cisco's acquisition of Metacloud.  Other recent acquisitions include Blue Box, Piston Cloud, and Cloudscaling.  Now there are a number of companies emerging that are focused on specific OpenStack projects. 

In this session, Boris will lead a panel discussion with CxOs of a group of companies from this next wave of OpenStack specialists. The panel will consist of Ken Rugg, CEO of Tesora, Joe Arnold, CPO of SwiftStack, Evan Powell, CEO of StackStorm, Pere Monclus, CTO of PLUMgrid, and John Griffith, Software Engineer at SolidFire and former PTL of Cinder.  They will discuss evolving roles of specialists and generalists in the OpenStack community, how companies should define themselves in a rapidly changing landscape, dissect interactions between specialists and generalists as the market matures, and explore predictions on the future of the OpenStack ecosystem.

Moderator: 

• Boris Renski, Co-founder and CMO at Mirantis

Panelists:

• Ken Rugg, Founder and CEO of Tesora (Trove)




• Joe Arnold, Founder and CPO of SwiftStack (Swift)




• Evan Powell, Co-founder and CEO of StackStorm (Mistral)




• Pere Monclus, Founder and CTO of PLUMgrid (Neutron)




• John Griffith, Software Engineer at SolidFire (Cinder)