AUSTIN, Texas – Open source computing is a job growth engine with potential to create world-class developers while enabling the mobile economy, according to a panel of executives who spoke on the topic at the Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit.
The panel focused on OpenStack, an open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. More than 171 companies are involved in OpenStack, including Dell, Cisco, AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent. Today’s panel included speakers from Dell, IBM, Nebula and Rackspace, the company that launched OpenStack in partnership with NASA. (Frank Frankovsky, who helps runs Facebook’s Open Compute Project, had other priorities and could not attend today.)
Panelists said that OpenStack is growing faster than Linux, and that it is attracting some of the best and the brightest in software development. Joseph George, director of marketing, cloud and big data solutions at Dell, said his company launched an OpenStack cloud platform computing solution last year. George says compensation is just one part of the picture when hiring OpenStack developers. “It’s about relevancy and the ability to change and influence what’s happening in the market,” says George. “How are we going to actually make the world better, how are we going to influence the market?”
“This is how you create really satisfying jobs for people, jobs that people want to work in for a long time,” said Nebula’s Cole Crawford. “A lot of new developers have an opportunity to make a name for themselves here. Code is currency, so a junior developer can grow into a senior developer.”
The panel took a series of questions about how OpenStack stacks up against Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services. OpenStack was portrayed as a good solution for companies and developers who want to build a truly custom cloud solution.
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