Speaker Details

Matt Smith's career spans over 20 years in several disciplines, including many years programming, databases, operating systems, data centre engineering and architecture.

He joined Sky in 2007 working on Sky’s broadcast authentication and processing systems. In 2010 he switched roles to lead the design and architecture function with a focus on the enterprise data centre. In this role he introduced a basic IaaS using what was DynamicOps and is now VMware’s vRA product, this reduced the delivery time of virtual servers from 5 days to 5 minutes and, I am happy to say, is still running and providing an enterprise focussed IaaS.

In 2014 Smith persuaded the management team at Sky that the future of the IaaS in the data centre was OpenStack and was given the massive opportunity to start a new team focussed on introducing OpenStack into the enterprise. This has been a tremendous success, which is mainly due the outstanding team at Sky and great software. We have significantly reduced the delivery time of servers, networks and storage and can now spin up whole application and database stack in minutes using standard and portable OpenStack APIs.

Being an keen programmer he has always strived to make writing and deploying successful applications as seamless and effortless as possible. This interest led to PaaS solutions and around 5 years ago we worked with the VMware team on Cloud Foundry implementations which at the time were unsuccessful. He is pleased to say Sky now has a successful implementation of Cloud Foundry and he now leads the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry teams, defining the strategy for cloud infrastructure and delivering solid self service data centre solutions based on open source technologies.

Outside of architecting and implementing the latest data centre technologies I am an avid follower of MotoGP and WSB along with the local UK BSB championship, doing geek programming (mainly in Python - he has to do this in secret!), and playing the guitar (badly). He lives with his wonderful family, Stephanie, Ella and Sydney (the dog), who you will find walking with him in all weather conditions along the bank of The Thames in West London.