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OpenStack superusers deliver the goods at CONNECT

The one-day conference in Melbourne featured some of the top thought leaders in open-source cloud computing from Aptira, EMC, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and more.

April 28, 2015
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MELBOURNE, Australia — OpenStack all-stars converged on the scene at CONNECT 2015, a large annual trade show organized in partnership with the Victorian Government.

The daylong conference dedicated to OpenStack was specifically designed for cloud leaders, technology decision-makers and heads of infrastructure and innovation to learn more about OpenStack; to discover the benefits of open source and its community; and to outline concrete steps that businesses can take to decide if an OpenStack Cloud is right for them.

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Randy Bias delivers the keynote.

By all accounts they delivered. Randy Bias, currently vice president of technology at EMC and a well-known and outspoken supporter of OpenStack, led the charge with a keynote titled “Bringing OpenStack into the Enterprise,” that you can catch the flavor of with his slide deck.

Bias also moderated a lively panel on the rise of the superuser which featured David Medberry of Time Warner Cable, Mike Dorman of GoDaddy, Glenn Moloney from the [NeCTAR project](http://www.nectar.org.au/), and Rik Harris at telecommunications giant Telstra.

There was standing-room only to hear Erez Yarkoni, the CIO of Telstra, speak on “The next step in our cloud partner journey,” a peek into the company’s new [cloud-first approach.](http://www.itnews.com.au/News/402968,telstra-turns-to-cloud-for-own-application-resiliency.aspx) Yarkoni hit the crowd with some eye-opening numbers, saying that 80 percent of [Fortune 500 companies use OpenStack](https://twitter.com/Telstra_EntGovt/status/590383079728017408) and that [the number of developers will triple by 2020.](https://twitter.com/Telstra_EntGovt/status/590385848190799872) In that landscape, he said, the open cloud platform is growing quickly as enterprises look to [avoid vendor lock-in.](https://twitter.com/Telstra_EntGovt/status/590382547135168512)

Other talks included Michael Still, senior software development manager at Rackspace and the project team lead for [Nova Compute](http://www.openstack.org/software/openstack-compute/) – the primary OpenStack project. His talk on deployment recommendations, touching on issues including scale, hypervisors, networking and testing, was based on a post from his [personal blog.](http://www.stillhq.com/openstack/000019.html) [Mike Dorman](https://twitter.com/misterdorm) of GoDaddy spoke about how the OpenStack cloud platform enables innovation and efficiencies and shared his [slides](http://www.slideshare.net/MikeDorman1/openstack-cloud-platform-enables) from the talk, too.

A fireside chat brought the heat at midday with OpenStack Foundation Board Director [Tristan Goode,](https://twitter.com/tristangoode) CEO of [Aptira,](http://aptira.com/) and [Tom Fifield,](https://twitter.com/TomFifield) community manager from the OpenStack Foundation and members of the Foundation ecosystem, including Red Hat and [Brocade.](http://www.brocade.com/solutions-technology/technology/openstack/index.page)

If you missed them in Melbourne, you can catch many of these ace speakers at the upcoming [OpenStack Summit in Vancouver:](https://www.openstack.org/summit/vancouver-2015/)

 

[Cover Photo](https://www.flickr.com/photos/huskyte/6992463587) by [Michael Theis](https://www.flickr.com/photos/huskyte/) // CC [BY NC](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

Nicole Martinelli
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