Mark Collier

A technology executive with a passion for building new businesses by focusing on developing the ecosystems around them, most recently founding the OpenStack open source cloud platform and leading the Marketing & Business Development efforts to make OpenStack the ubiquitous cloud platform. OpenStack is one of the fastest growing open source projects in history, due in large part to the focus on building a large and sustainable ecosystem of companies to contribute and build businesses around the software, starting with Rackspace and NASA and later adding Dell, HP, Red Hat, IBM, Cisco, Canonical, SUSE, and many others. This has been my primary focus, along with establishing the OpenStack brand as VP of Marketing & Business Development for OpenStack at Rackspace. According to the "Strengths Finder" test, my top 6 strengths are 1) Strategic 2) Self Assurance 3) Learner 4) Ideation and 5) Arranger and 6) Achiever, which roughly translates into "big picture guy who also likes to get shit done". "Learner" translates to: a self taught, lifelong geek from witnessing the birth of the Apple II to programing in Logo on the Coleco Adam to Twitter and now OpenStack. As a geek who studied economics, I'm particularly drawn to the power of disruptive technology, from a computer on every desk (the 90s, when I worked at Dell) to every song in your pocket (the 2000's, when I worked at Yahoo! Music) to on demand supercomputing (the 2010s, when I worked at Rackspace Cloud and started OpenStack,with many others). In 2012 I helped start the OpenStack Foundation and have accepted the role of Chief Operating Officer to see how much disrupting we can do in 2013 with the free and open source cloud platform. My Goal is to make OpenStack the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.