Top executives from leading open-source IT and data center organizations will take the stage to launch StackingIT at DatacenterDynamics’ annual West Coast conference at the Marriott Marquis, San Francisco on July 30 and 31.

The DCD Internet event kicks off with a roundtable, discussing progress towards the open-source, software-defined, data-driven data center, in which six leaders will share their vision with a powerful gathering of West Coast data center business executives and technology professionals.

The event focuses on the unique requirements of the internet-facing, web-scale data center – that segment of the industry where the “third platform” - IoT, mobility, streaming media, and big data/analytics - drive the open-source movement. Participating in this roundtable are:

stacking it people
Calista Redmond, OpenPower; Neela Jacques, OpenDaylight; Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation; Corey Bell, Open Compute Project; Alan Clark, OpenStack; Gabe Cole, OpenIX – DCD
  • Calista Redmond, director, OpenPower Alliance
  • Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight
  • Jim Zemlin, executive director, Linux Foundation
  • Corey Bell, chief executive officer, Open Compute Project Foundation
  • Alan Clark, board chair, OpenStack Foundation
  • Gabe Cole, chair, data center standards, OpenIX

“We’re thrilled to be able to present this first-ever open-source leadership forum,” said George Rockett, co-founding CEO, DatacenterDynamics, London. “This effort formally launches an important new conference series that will be produced side-by-side with our core DCD Converged events globally. In 2015, this series includes Singapore, Chicago and London, expanding in 2016.”

“From network fabric to the server and storage racks and to the critical environment, a deep disruptive data center transformation is going on right now, globally. The data center of today is unnecessarily over-complicated and proprietary,” said Cole Crawford, formerly the founding CEO of the Open Compute Project. “Open-sourcing the full-stack of the data center and cloud is now ready to move out from engineering R&D to a more market oriented approach so that a full ecosystem can develop. StackingIT provides a much needed forum for the data center buy-side to properly evaluate their open-source roadmaps.” He now serves as global chair for this new conference series.

Among the open-source companies already planning on participating in the StackingIT track forum in San Francisco are Mesosphere, StackStorm, Cumulus Networks, Coolan, EDCS Power, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, Rackspace, Hyve, and Vantage Data Centers.

“The point of open-sourcing,“ said Bruce Taylor, executive vice president for DCD North America, “is to spur innovation, drive down costs, and drive up efficiency – all the while gaining time-to-market competitive advantage, developmental, developmental and operational agility and production scalability. That’s what we’ll focus on for this introductory StackingIT track in San Francisco, Singapore and Chicago, but scale up to a full conference and expo hall co-located with DCD Converged for London in the Fall and the full 2016 conference schedule.”