And that’s a wrap!
This week flew by — almost as quickly as the direct flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt. We had the opportunity to interface with so many members of the Cloud Foundry community in a spectacular event space and left Summit with a renewed appreciation for our unique culture, dedicated developers, inclusive attitude and visionary ambition. Speaking of which, what was the buzz word on everybody’s tongues today?
Diversity.
- Atos’ Ursula Morgenstern gave a thought-provoking keynote speech on the need for diversity across all industries, asking the audience to consider whether cloud as a sector will be the catalyst for greater diversity in IT. While acknowledging the progress that’s been made with regard to diversity across the tech industry, Ursula reminded the room of the challenges women continue to face with regards to entering the market, rising within the profession and reaching the top.
- Many of Cloud Foundry Summit’s attendees joined the Diversity Luncheon, led with an interactive keynote given by Tracy Miranda, founder of Kichwa Coders, a consultancy specializing in Eclipse tools for scientific and embedded software. Tracy demonstrated the inequity of privilege by having attendees throw balls into a bucket at close and far ranges to highlight the disparate starting lines for differently privileged people, then oversaw roundtable discussions on community, inclusivity and bias.
- The Cloud Foundry Foundation is committed to representing all members of the Cloud Foundry community and actively strives to be an all-inclusive organization, providing assets like restrooms designated for non-binary individuals at events, and is always open to feedback from the community on how to improve inclusivity and increase diversity.
- A huge thank you to our diverse event emcees: Amy Frampton, Director of Product Marketing at HPE Cloud, who led the main stage throughout Cloud Foundry Summit; Paula Kennedy, Director of Business Operations, EMEA Services at VMware; and Sara Lenz, anynines’ Project Manager. Check out our two-part Q+A with Paula and Sara on Cloud Foundry, diversity and Frankfurt Summit! Part I and Part II.
Keynote Takeaways
- Marc Geall, SVP, Head of Platform Partner Ecosystem, GCO, led a discussion on the fickle nature of the industry, noting that 40 percent of companies will be dead in ten years. “Give customers the opportunity to run Cloud Foundry to reimagine, reinvent and run digital, but we can’t do it on our own,” he said. “We have to leverage the power of the diversity of the ecosystem.”
- As mentioned above, Atos’ Ursula Morgenstern gave a riveting talk on the potential for diverse disruption within the cloud industry, noting that 40% of the Atos team working on the technology solutions powering the Olympic Games were women.
- Bas van Essen of the Dutch Government Agency Rijkswaterstaat spoke to the ways in which they are addressing the people and process aspects of digital transformation in order to successfully execute on a growing portfolio of initiatives.
- How does a huge company go about changing their software development processes and changing the company’s mindset? We heard the secrets from Carsten Schade, Head of Integration Technologies, Volkswagen and Dr. Roy Sauer, VW Group IT CTO.
- Orest Onuszko, System Administrator at Rakuten Deutschland GmbH, took a look back at the five years in which a team of seven engineers has been running Cloud Foundry.
- Summit came to a close when CEO Sam Ramji sat down with EMC’s CTO John Roese to discuss application development, product launches and the vision for the coming year.
Miss the news from the first day of Summit? Check it out here.
Thank you to the more than 700 registered attendees at Summit,
our dedicated Ambassadors, the fantastic staff of Congress Center Messe,
and, of course, to our valued Sponsors and Members for all you do!
See you next year!
