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!