He started his OpenStack journey with Grizzly, delivering the first HPC cloud in APAC for a Singapore University making use of SRIOV technologies combined with big data. He has extensive deployment experience on configuration management and automation of private cloud based on OpenStack.

Alex is currently an APJ Cloud Consultant in the Helion Cloud team at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, where he evangelizes the OpenSource side of the Helion portfolio (OpenStack / Cloud Foundry / Ceph).

He enjoys running workshops and seminars in the APJ region for cloud adopters.

Now at Aptira, she continues to explore more OpenStack technologies and drives business strategy and product management across enterprise for OpenStack platform. As an OpenStack enthusiast, she is also actively involved in helping build an open community and offering technical and general advice for Taiwan OpenStack User Group.

He has held a number of senior management appointments including the IT Director at the University of New South Wales @ the Australian Defence Force Academy, Network & Infrastructure Manager at the Commonwealth Insurance and Superannuation Commission and Associate Director of the Information Management & Technology Branch at the then Federal Department of Primary

Industries & Energy. He also served as the Director of Information Systems for the Australian Air Force Cadets within the Australian Department of Defence.

Throughout his career, Richard has taken a strategic leadership role in shaping and enhancing the role of Information Technology within various organisations and shaping the use of Information Technology in research. In his recent roles Richard helped shape the future of CAUDIT as a platform for collaboration for IT staff in Higher Education, and has taken a leadership role in negotiating

innovative sector wide procurement arrangements with suppliers which have delivered significant value to Higher Education. In 2005 he led an initiative to raise the awareness of CIO’s to the need to support research in higher education and led a programme with leading universities in the UK, Europe and the USA to identify and share best practice and strategies. More recently he has played a key national and international leadership role in enhancing research through the use of new methodologies and development of e‐Research infrastructure that are enabled by Information Technology as part of the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. He has fostered international collaboration by higher education ICT staff in various countries in the world, and taken a lead role in the formation of the Coalition of Higher Education Information Technology Associations (CHEITA) which is an umbrella organisation that promotes international collaboration.

Richard is a certified Adair Leadership International trainer and member of the faculty of the South African and Hong Kong Leadership Institutes for IT professionals working in higher education. He is a former member of the CAUDIT Board, and is a former Director on the board of EDUCAUSE which is a US based association which represents the best thinking in higher education IT.

Richard holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics) and is a Senior Member & Certified Professional of the Australian Computer Society. He has a keen interest in landscape photography, hiking, mountain biking, he is a 1st Dan Black Belt Instructor in Tae Kwon Do, and a qualified Snowboarding Instructor. He lives and works in Canberra, Australia.

During his 6 years at NetApp, Matt has helped shape the NetApp Managed Service capability in ANZ in his role as a Professional Services manager. Since taking on the leadership of the Systems Engineering team he has built an industry leading pre-sales team and has been instrumental in local product management and developing utility commercial models for enterprise accounts.

Matt has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has held numerous roles; including mainframe systems programmer, automation specialist and infrastructure architect. He has a passion for managing people and has over 10 years’ experience building high performance teams.

Matt has a very broad range of experience covering many aspects of IT, including virtualisation, data analytics and hybrid cloud solutions. He holds a degree in science and still has a passion for ecology.

Steven is currently a senior developer at SUSE, working on primarily on SUSE OpenStack Cloud and related projects.

John is one of the driving forces behind NetApp’s continued expansion into flash and works closely with field sales, the channel and alliance technology partners to provide innovative solutions that solve customer business challenges.

While John is NetApp’s flash champion, he continues to provide technology insights and market intelligence to trends that impacts both NetApp and its customers.

Prior to his current role, John was NetApp’s ANZ’s principal technologist for over six years and has over 20 years experience working in the IT industry.

John joined NetApp in 2006 as a systems engineer. Prior to this, he was a principal of GRID IT, where he built relationships with a variety of major storage vendors while also helping to start two storage-related businesses. At GRID IT, John was involved in senior pre-sales, consulting and training for Legato, Veritas, and StorageTek.

In his spare time, John enjoys singing, writing and cooking. He also spends time researching modernist and post modernist philosophy, ancient history, social justice and global development.