The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors met in-person for two
days
in Boston last week.
The first day was a strategic planning
workshop
and the second day was a regular board meeting.
Executive Director Update
After a roll call and approving the minutes of the previous meeting,
Jonathan gave a presentation outlining his perspective on where
OpenStack is
at.
He talked about perception challenges that the Foundation is working
to address, emphasizing the messages of "costs less, does more" and
"all apps need Open Infrastructure".
He described how the Foundation has been iterating on a "pitch deck"
and had completed twenty or so interviews with journalists where they
presented this deck in a concerted effort to "change the
narrative". This begins by talking about some recent industry trends,
including a slowdown in the rate of public cloud growth and the
coverage of Snap's significant spending on public cloud services
compared to their revenues.
It goes on to compare "Gen 1" and "Gen 2" private clouds, with the
challenges moving from technology and people to culture and
processes. The advantage of a multi-cloud strategy, with sophisticated
workload placement was discussed as well as some detailed information
backing up the claim that companies are achieving cost savings with
OpenStack.
Jonathan described how this presentation had been very well received,
and had resulted in some very positive
coverage.
Jonathan briefly touched on key improvements in Ocata and information
about the profile of our contributors. This resulted in some debate
about the value of "vanity metrics" and there was general agreement
that while there continues to be demand for this information, we we
should all be cautious in over-emphasizing it.
Finally, Jonathan reflected on feedback from the Project Team
Gathering in Atlanta. Attendance was strong and attendees reported
feeling less distractions and a greater ability to have important
discussions because of the smaller venue and attendee count. While it
was mostly seen as a great success, there are areas for improvement
including the approach to choosing hotels and committing to hotel room
bookings, how scheduling is organized, the size of some rooms,
etc. Jonathan mentioned the success of the Forum and the OpenStack
Summit in Boston will be key.
User Committee and Compensation Committee
The board spent a fairly short time discussing two matters from its
committees.
Firstly, a proposal from the User Committee Product Working Group for
facilitating the organization of the schedule for The Forum in Boston
was well received, but since the board encouraged all interested
parties to work with the Foundation staff who are coordinating the
planning, particularly Tom Fifield and Thierry Carrez.
Secondly, the board approved Jonathan's goals for 2017, which had been
prepared by the Compensation Committee and sent to board members
earlier for review. The board only sets Jonathan's goals, and empower
him to set the goals for the rest of the staff. Related to Jonathan's
goals, the board also had some discussion later around documenting the
goals of the board itself.
Membership Applications
Significant time during the day was given over to considering some
corporate membership applications.
With HPE resigning its Platinum membership, we had invited
applications to take over its slot and received applications from
Ericsson and Huawei. Both companies had previously applied in
November, 2014 at the OpenStack Summit in Paris to replace Nebula as
Platinum member, but Intel had been successful that time.
Anni Lai presented for Huawei and Chris
Price presented for Ericsson. Both
described their employer's vision for OpenStack, and their wide range
of contributions to date. Both also talked about their position in the
market, their key customers, and how they are growing the OpenStack
ecosystem. The presentations were well received and, after an
executive session, the board voted to approve Huawei as a Platinum
member. The board expressed their gratitude for Ericsson's interest
and preparation, observing that having multiple companies interested
in Platinum membership opportunities is a sign of the strength of our
community.
Representatives from H3C also presented
their application for Gold membership. H3C is a prominent IT vendor in
China's enterprise IT market, distributes an OpenStack based cloud
product, has several very large reference customers, and is
establishing itself as a technical contributor to the project. After
executive session, the board voted to approve H3C as a Gold member.
Wrapping Up
One piece of good news wasn't public during the meeting, but has since
been announced by
Jonathan:
The Board also approved the promotion of Thierry Carrez to VP of
Engineering for the OpenStack Foundation. Thierry has been a leader
in the technical community since the beginning of OpenStack and has
also built a team within the Foundation focused on upstream
collaboration.
I think it's safe to say the board were warmly supportive of this
change, wished Thierry every success in this new role, and looked
forward to working more closely with Thierry than ever before.
And, with that, the board dispersed feeling pretty fried after an
intense couple of days of discussions!