The Debate - Open Source and the Cloud


Rick Clark works for Cisco Systems as a Principal Engineer. Previously he was Project Lead for Openstack and the engineering manager for Ubuntu Server. Rick is the father of 4 year old twin girls, and a rabid hockey fan. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Neil Levine has been professionally using and deploying Linux and open-source software into the enterprise for over 15 years. After working as a systems and network administrator in the hosting and telecoms sector in the mid-90s, Neil joined Claranet in 1997 where as CTO he helped grow the company into the largest, independent internet service provider in Europe, covering nine countries, built almost exclusively on open-source software. In 2009, Neil joined Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project, as Vice-President of Corporate Services, where he is responsible for enterprise and cloud strategy. Neil holds an MA in Political Science from Columbia University and a BSc in Economics from University College London.

Marten Mickos builds global disruptive businesses. As CEO of MySQL AB for seven years, Mickos grew that company from a garage start-up to the second largest open source company in the world. After the acquisition by Sun Microsystems of MySQL AB for $1bn, he served as Senior Vice President of Sun’s Database Group.

Previously, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He is a member of the board of RightScale, Mozilla Messaging and Electrosonic. Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology. In 2006 he received the Audemars Piguet “Changing Times Award: European Entrepreneur of the Year 2006” and the Nokia Foundation Award.

Marten’s tweets can be followed at www.twitter.com/martenmickos and Wikipedia provides more on information on him.

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James Urquhart manages cloud computing infrastructure strategy for the Server Provider Systems Unit of Cisco Systems. Named one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing by the MIT Technology Review, and author of the popular C|NET Blog Network blog, The Wisdom of Clouds, Mr. Urquhart brings a deep understanding of these disruptive technologies and the business opportunities they afford.

Mr. Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. Prior to joining Cisco, Mr. Urquhart held leadership roles at Forte Software, Sun Microsystems, and utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt Corporation.

Mr. Urquhart graduated from Macalester College with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics.

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