Since the Foundation launched last September, we’ve continued to build out a diverse team. This has been a big focus to keep up with the incredible growth in the OpenStack community with another new software release (Grizzly), the Portland Summit with over 2600 people (double San Diego!), and the start of the work to organize the first international Summit in Hong Kong (expecting over 4,000 people).
To keep up with such amazing growth, we expanded the team with new roles to drive adoption of the software, support the development process and grow the OpenStack ecosystem. Heidi Bretz joined as Director of Business Development, Margie Callard as Marketing Manager, Jeremy Stanley as Infrastructure Engineer and Tom Fifield as User Community Manager.
Heidi joined prior to the Summit in Portland and has been quickly getting to know the companies in our ecosystem, so many of you may have already met her. She comes from Amazon Web Services, where she worked to build a successful ecosystem around Mechanical Turk. She has vast experience building relationships with partners while working for AWS, Microsoft, Netscape, and Red Herring.
Margie is covering a wide range of marketing activities for the Foundation, including analyst relations and content development, driving many of the OpenStack user stories found at openstack.org/user-stories. She joined the Foundation from Internap, where she was first became involved in the OpenStack community marketing their cloud products.
Jeremy is supporting the continuous integration systems and infrastructure for the OpenStack developer community as a core member of the Infrastructure Team, assisting with security vulnerability management for the OpenStack project. You can find him on IRC #openstack-infra, his nickname is fungi.
Tom Fifield is the most recent to join as User Community Manager, focused on helping users be successful with OpenStack, working closely with our other community manager Stefano Maffulli who many of you already know. Tom is a known name in the community as he’s one of the authors of the OpenStack Operations guide and the architect of one of the earliest (and largest!) OpenStack implementations. He currently lives in Australia, speaks Mandarin and has familiarity with Japanese. He and Stefano will split the tasks necessary to keep fueling the OpenStack community’s growth from the perspective of adoption and development of the product. With 100 user groups around the world, hundreds of individual developers and companies contributing to OpenStack there is lots that needs to be done. Please hang out on IRC #openstack-community to say hello to Tom: his nickname is fifieldt.
I hope to see all of you at the Summit in Hong Kong this November! Next week we’ll begin accepting speaking submissions, as well as selling tickets and sponsorships.
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