OpenStack Days Mexico highlights growing interest

The cloud is increasingly popular in Mexico, even during the summer season.

Professionals from across the country convened at the World Trade Center in Mexico City to celebrate OpenStack Days Mexico. This year saw a 31 percent increase in attendance from 2015.

The free June 13 event featured speakers from the IT, industry, media and education sectors. It was cross promoted with the Guadalajara user group, which is looking forward to hosting the next OpenStack Hackathon in September.

Nadia Goncebat Isaack, marketer at KIO Networks, one of the organizers behind the event, spoke to Superuser about key takeaways.

Who were the local organizers? What are the main takeaways from this year’s event?

Local organizer KIO Networks has been involved with the OpenStack Foundation since 2012 – the year the company became the first certified Latin American OpenStack member.

Since 2013, one of KIO´s main talking points has been promoting OpenStack and the sense of community that is so important for the project. The company has organized OpenStack Days Mexico events since 2014.

This year, we could definitely tell that the sense of community here has grown. Companies finally began to understand that the biggest strength in being an OpenStack community member is unity and teamwork and that those factors together will bring better benefits to the IT sector.

This time, sponsor companies were much more aware of this event and the impact that using this technology is having in all sectors, so they were more involved in many aspects like teamwork, organization and promotion of the event.

#OpenStackDay Mexico pic.twitter.com/xVfjX4ItCt

— LAGR (@javiervasquez94) June 17, 2016

Who gave the opening remarks, what was the main message?

The master of ceremonies was Peter Zadrozny, chief technology officer of KIO Networks. The main point of his opening remarks was to explain how OpenStack is already a successful project worldwide and, for that reason, it is very important for Latin America to get involved and cooperate in this community.

He also explained was how the OpenStack platform provides extraordinary benefits in terms of cost, technology, innovation and time to the IT sector – small to large companies, service provider to private and public companies. Latin America has a big opportunity in this technology so it is important to get our communities together to take advantage of it. This is the moment to do it and it is only possible if we do it together.

Was the event a success?

Yes. Considering that our goal was 600 people attending and 786 people showed up, I have to say that it was a successful event. Even more so because our audience consisted of IT professionals, decision makers in the IT and business sector, graduate students in systems and computing science and engineering students in their final semesters.

Which local companies participated and what sectors are they in?

Since our local OpenStack user groups have such good relationships with the companies and organizations in our communities, we had representation from IT (Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, IBM), media (Software Guru, Conversus) and education (Aliat Universidades, ITAM, Tec de Monterrey) sectors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY4mmxPqf88

Which sessions were the most packed?

Thanks to the great attendance of the event, all the keynote sessions were filled to capacity and were definitely the most packed sessions of the event.

The organization team was dedicated in compiling the best keynotes presentations possible because we really wanted to present important content about trends in OpenStack – such as the increasing popularity of Containers and an emphasis on the cloud versus commercial information about the sponsors.

If there are ties to a local user group, which one?

This year, we contacted the Guadalajara OpenStack user group, which is a big community in Northern Mexico, and worked together with them to promote the OpenStack Day. We, in return, helped them promote the Guadalajara Hackathon, an OpenStack App development event that is taking place September 9-11.

How can people get involved for next year?

For the first time, we organized a call for speakers because we wanted to give an opportunity to speak during sessions to individual members, not just companies. We understood that the OpenStack community is made up of companies and individual members who are active collaborators in open source projects. Their experiences are very important and enlightening for the audience as well.

We expect to do this again next year.

Cover Photo // CC by NC

Tags: Interview, OS Days