2015 Board Election: Gold Member Candidate List

“I enjoy working with all the different people involved with OpenStack. There is constant state of optimism and a drive to improve. If I had to pick one thing that makes me feel renewed and happy about my work, it would be helping people to improve themselves. I always am humbled when I can help someone find a new job or gain a new skill. This is what keeps me going.”

Haiying Wang melds deep technical experience with strong business sense.  He joined Huawei in 2010 and is the VP and CTO of Cloud Computing, responsible for Cloud strategy and technology. He initiated and is spearheading Huawei’s OpenStack cloud effort, leading Huawei to transform into an Open Source enthusiast and champion. Haiying's mission is to make OpenStack adoption easier in the Telco and emergent market. Prior to Huawei, Haiying co-founded and served as CEO of Digital Support Technology, a company focused on delivering an innovative online support service. Haiying was involved in infrastructure virtualization and abstraction from the early days, leading an R&D  team at VMware when its engineering grew from 100+ to 1000+. Prior to VMware, he joined the initial Vitria Technology engineering team as a Sr. Architect. Vitria Technology was a leading business enterprise application integration company. At SGI, Haiying contributed to the world first interactive TV system. Haiying holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Alberta and an MBA from Wharton School.

After 20+ years’ experience in deep technical roles, I embraced OpenStack in my home country, Australia, and became passionate about it recognising it's immense potential the world over. I soon recognised however, that the Australian OpenStack community needed a real boost.  So a little more than 3 years ago I founded the Australian OpenStack User Group (AOSUG).  The response has been fantastic, and we have grown to over 850 members in that 3 years.   While much of my time has been spent nurturing the OpenStack community in Australia, I have been actively supporting the growth of the Indian OpenStack community.  I've spent time in India promoting and speaking about OpenStack, and I actively take part in meetups online around the world whenever possible.

I am deeply humble for the opportunity to have represented the community builders, operators, developers and end users of OpenStack on the Foundation's Board of Directors – everyone, including the people who don’t write the code, but still have lots to offer.  I plan on continuing to work to promote OpenStack in every possible way, so that it becomes ubiquitous and full-featured, while remaining, most importantly, truly open.

My twitter is @tristangoode and I also quite like beer, I'm Australian!

Chris C. Kemp is an entrepreneurial executive with a passion for igniting innovation in high-tech organizations. Kemp is a Founder of Nebula, a company he started after serving as the Chief Technology Officer of NASA. Kemp co-founded the OpenStack project, and provided leadership and funding for the development of OpenStack’s first project, Nova.  

As the CTO NASA, Chris was responsible for pioneering work in cloud computing, open source, and open government. Chris served on the White House Cloud Computing Executive Steering Committee, and chaired the Cloud Standards Working Group. Previously, he served as the CIO of NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley where he forged partnerships with Google and Microsoft and helped create Google Moon, Google Mars, and Microsoft World Wide Telescope. Prior to joining NASA, Chris helped create the third largest online community Classmates.com, was the founding CEO of the leading web-based vacation rental platform Escapia (AWAY), and, as the founding CEO of Netran, where he developed OpenShop, the first online grocery shopping platform for Kroger, the world’s largest grocery store chain.  

Boris is the co-founder and CMO at Mirantis. Operationally responsible for Mirantis’ marketing strategy, Boris acts as a spokesperson for the company and is Mirantis’ public face in the OpenStack community. Boris' influence was instrumental in Mirantis' current focus on OpenStack. 

In his role, Boris works to ensure that Mirantis’ marketing efforts don’t just promote the Mirantis brand, but also help further global awareness of the OpenStack community. To that effect, Mirantis is a regular sponsor of OpenStack summits, promotes OpenStack at unaffiliated trade shows such as Cloud Connect and OSCON, and helps run regional communities in the Bay Area, Russia, and Ukraine.

Boris continuously helps evangelize the OpenStack community by regularly blogging about it (mirantis.com/blog), talking on behalf of the community at various conferences, and engaging in business development activities to attract new member companies and contributors.

During 15 years of his professional career, Boris held several executive positions with technology companies he helped establish. He was a founder and CEO of Selectosa Systems, an IT consulting company which was subsequently acquired in 2006; and is a co-founder and angel investor at AGroup.lv, now a venture-backed enterprise software company headquartered in Europe.

Arkady has been a member of OpenStack since Grizzly. He is director of engineering leading a team of developers responsible for development of DellEMC OpenStack solutions.  Arkady has PhD. in CS from UIUC.  He straddled academic, research, architect, developer, and product owner roles.  Arkady roles included  but not limited to, research publications and Program committee member for various conferences like FAST (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast11/organizers.html), Chair or board member  of several standard activities, like DAT (http://www.datcollaborative.org),  OpenFabric (https://www.openfabrics.org/index.php) and MPI-RT (http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~yogi/dandass-mpirt-2004.pdf) to product delivery, like EMC Atmos, Dell OpenStack solutions among others.

Arkady represents Dell Technologies at OpenStack, including Dell EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VirtuStream.

Rob's been involved in the OpenStack community dating to its origin in 2010. He founded NetApp’s OpenStack effort and is presently serving in his fourth term as a member of the foundation's Board of Directors. He's contributed to the community and overall adoption of OpenStack in capacities ranging from having co-founded the Manila project, to architecting some of the earliest OpenStack on NetApp deployments, to co-chairing the Board's membership committee, as a summit track curator, to frequently speaking at design summits, conferences and user groups globally.   His tenure at NetApp has spanned from co-founder of NetApp’s cloud architecture team, to currently leading product & strategy for Open Ecoystem projects and technologies.

Tsugikazu SHIBATA is working for OSS promotion Center of NEC. He is actively working for Linux over 10 years and for OpenStack since 2011. He is having a senior role of partner relationship for Open Source industry as a business side and also advocate join and work for the Open Source community especially for Japanese and Asian developers as community side.

He is also member of the board of the Linux Foundation since 2006. He is working with the Linux Foundation to expand ecosystem of Linux for Asian countries.

He is also a technical committee member of the Open Invention Network (OIN) from NEC. His activity of solving IP issue of the Open Source is being very important even for OpenStack and surrounding ecosystem.

By these background, he has an advisory role of OpenStack development team in NEC. The team is actively contributing to OpenStack community and keeping top 10 contributors in the past couple of years.

I am responsible for heading up Architecture within the Ericsson group (VP Architecture reporting to CTO) being responsible for the Network and Implementation architecture for all Ericsson products. I have also been heading up Ericsson Cloud Program, i.e. defining and setting the strategy around cloud for the company, including our strategic choice to base our cloud platform product upon OpenStack. Right now my focus is to ensure that we can provide an NFV (Network Function Virtualization) environment for Telco Operators, based on Openstack, that can retain and improve the carrier-grade SLA’s when our applications goes from a box-based/native deployment to a cloud based deployment model. Ericsson is today taking a lead position in transforming legacy telco applications to virtulizaed NFV applications running in an Openstack based environment. We are one of the founding members and Technical Chair in OPNFV which is a consortia (part of Linux Foundation) of Operators and vendors with the target to create a working reference solution for NFV applications based upon Openstack. I have myself, together with other industry leaders, been presenting the needs and requirements from an NFV perspective towards Openstack.

Ericsson and myself will continue to drive the work to ensure that Openstack also well adresses the new segment of NFV which is a clear extension of the market that Openstack will be possible to adress.

I am also responsible for Ericsson OpenSource strategy and have been instrumental in drving the foundation of Ericsson initiated opensource projects such as Erlang and OpenSAF where Ericsson has been the founder and major contributor of code.

I have spent my entire career within Ericsson entirely within R&D and management and have been responsible for Ericsson server and platform development (Processor, Operating System, Middleware etc) but is now part of the CTO office driving technology strategy across the company.

I am the CTO and co-founder of Piston. At Piston, I've been responsible for building and managing the R&D team that build Piston CloudOS™ as well as Piston OpenStack. My current responsibilities at Piston are to evangelize OpenStack as well as Piston's technology, and also to push development at Piston in new directions.

I currently serve on the OpenStack Foundation Board, and am the 2015/2016 co-chair of the Foundation Board Defcore committee. Prior to starting Piston, I was an early employee of Slicehost before its acquisition by Rackspace. I helped launch OpenStack in 2010, and was an originating member of nova-core.

As VP/CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems I am responsible for shaping Cisco's strategy and products in cloud computing.  I also serve as Cisco's representative and vice-chairman of the OpenStack Foundation board of directors and am a passionate advocate of open source software development. Cisco is a major contributor to OpenStack across multiple projects including: Neutron, Nova, Horizon, Kolla, Magnum and others. I am a frequent invited speaker at major conferences on cloud computing and open source.

Formerly, I was VP/CTO Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems, where I led development of SunCloud, was responsible for all of Sun's Internet-facing web sites and services, and was an early member of the JavaSoft executive team.  At other points in my career, at Salesforce.com I led the development of the AppExchange, and was CTO at Radar Networks, a semantic web startup.  In the 1980's I was a director of R&D at Thinking Machines, where I developed parallel algorithms for AI and machine vision for the massively parallel Connection Machine.   I have a B.S. from Cornell University and Ph.D. in computer science from New York University.

Simon is Chairman of Aptira, the leading OpenStack services company in the Asia-Pacific region. He is the former CEO of DreamHost, and a founding member and Board member of the OpenStack Foundation. Simon has Chaired the Gold Member Committee and been a member of the Finance Committee, DefCore Committee and Product Working Group of the Foundation.

During Simon's tenure as CEO from 2011-2015, DreamHost has been a major contributor of code, governance and community to OpenStack. DreamHost launched DreamCompute, a public cloud computing service powered by OpenStack, Ceph and Astara in 2013.

Simon was co-founder Co-founder and Chair of Akanda, the major developer and supporter of the OpenStack project Astara, a network services orchestration platform for OpenStack clouds.

Simon was Co-founder and Chair of Inktank, the company behind the Ceph storage system, acquired by Red Hat in April 2014. 

Preeti is a Vice President at Yahoo! responsible for Cloud Services.  She runs the OpenStack effort at Yahoo! along with a number of Cloud Services all delivering agility to Yahoo developers and operations (DevOps).  She came to Yahoo from VMware, where she lead the development of vCloud Director and various management products.  

Steve leads Symantec’s Cloud Platform Engineering (CPE) organization, chartered with building and running essential platform and infrastructure services for next generation Symantec products and services.

Steve has extensive and broad-based technology development, operations, and business management experience. He has been featured for leadership in OpenStack operational computing, and as an advocate of the advantages of cloud computing as integral to accelerating internal innovation. Steve has been part of the OpenStack community since Diablo and was part of the team that took Essex into production, and he has been Gold level Director since Jan 2015.

Steve is a strong proponent of opensource as pivotal in transforming an engineering culture; that the benefits of merit-based, transparent, and peer-reviewed designs and code is where true innovation occurs.