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OSIDays 2014 Post Show

 

 

Open Source India 2014
The Industry Meets the Community

Here is a tour of the 11th edition of Asia’s largest convention on open source, featuring over 45+
speakers in various sessions, hands-on workshops and success stories. 

Open Source India 2014, a two-day event focusing on the collaboration between the industry and the community, witnessed a whopping 7500+ registrations. At the event, the queues outside registration booths began to form almost an hour before the scheduled time. People who already had a Silver Pass wanted to upgrade it to a Silver Plus, Gold or Platinum, in order to attend more sessions and workshops. By noon of the first day, i.e., on November 7, the organisers reluctantly stopped issuing passes for several tracks and workshops because of non-availability of seats.

Taking open source technology to another level, OSI was packed with nearly 45 sessions by eminent speakers like Lux Rao (CTO, technology services, HP), C N Krishnan (programme director, Anna University), Aahit Gaba (open source attorney, Lyra Infosystems Pvt Ltd) and Jacob Singh (regional director, Acquia India). Talks on FOSS for everyone, the cloud, mobile app development, databases, Web development, kernel development, the OpenStack mini conference, IT infrastructure management and the ‘Success Stories’ track were all conducted on time.

Major highlights of the event

Record-breaking attendance for the keynotes and workshops: Extra seating had to be arranged for all the keynote sessions and the workshops. All the four keynote sessions witnessed a major turnout and the crowds seemed to be a highly satisfied lot. The same could be said of the workshops, which were also a total hit and were much talked about.

The ‘Success Stories’ track: This was introduced in the 10th edition of Open Source India and was much talked about at the event by the speakers and the attendees. CIOs and CTOs of prominent companies like Rediff.com, Goibibo, bookmyshow.com, Justdial, Patterbuzz, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd, and Karunya University shared their experiences of implementing open source in their respective organisations. Talking to our correspondent after his talk, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, CTO, Justdial, said, “Well, it keeps getting more and more interesting every time and the crowd was more interactive. This time, there are a lot of young people who have come in and they are asking a lot of questions. The event is better organised, and is a lot more focused.”

The HP and Microsoft tech challenges: Long queues were witnessed at the HP Helion and Microsoft booths in between the sessions. There were many intriguing activities conducted at these two booths, with a lot of goodies being given away to the participants. Speaking about this, Rajiv Pandey, distinguished technologist, HP Cloud, said, “I think the event is great and it is amazing to see what’s going on with open source here in India. I loved the energy and excitement here; it’s really nice. While talking to people coming to the HP booth, I realised that they know so much about the new technologies and that they are very up-to-date, which was very gratifying. It’s been a great event. It’s already been 11 years of OSI and there clearly has been good work put into it. I would love to be a part of it in the years to come.”

Wipro Talent Hunt: IT giant, Wipro Technologies, had tied up with Open Source India 2014 to recruit candidates for diverse profiles and a few applicants were shortlisted too.

Day 1
The first day of the convention began with the welcome speech by Rahul Chopra, managing director, EFY Group. He spoke about Open Source India’s 11-year journey and thanked everyone for the love they have shown for this event.
The sessions started with a keynote by Rajeev Pandey, distinguished technologist, HP Cloud, who spoke about ‘Deployment architecture for OpenStack in the enterprise’, which set the ball rolling for an eventful day for the IT professionals. He kept the audience enthralled with his vast knowledge and brilliant presentation skills.

The crowd then dispersed into the various halls and workshop rooms where different sessions were being conducted. The first half of Day 1 had ‘FOSS for everyone’, ‘Cloud and Mobile App Development’ tracks, and the speakers included Anthony Rees (HP Cloud), Jose Miguel Parrella (CTO, M&O, Microsoft Corp) and Michael Meskes (CEO, Credativ International GmbH), amongst others. Apart from these sessions, there were hands-on workshops going on simultaneously on topics like ‘MySQL performance tuning’, ‘Drupal’ and ‘Architecturing and building solutions using MongoDB’.

The second half of Day 1 also started with a keynote, this time by Ramesh Srinivasan, senior director, Linux and virtualisation, Oracle and Sanjay Manwani, director, MySQL, Oracle India. They enlightened the audience on how far open source has travelled, discussing the state of the Penguin, and the Dolphin. Other post-lunch tracks included a mini conference on ‘OpenStack and the kernel’ as well as a workshop on ‘Big Data’.
Everyone, including the exhibitors, speakers as well as the attendees, seemed satisfied with the efforts put in by the OSI content team and expectations grew for the second day.

Day 2
With Day 1 being a great success, the second day was filled with open source enthusiasts eager to acquire more knowledge about the latest trends and technologies. Day 2 commenced with a keynote session by Jose Miguel Parrella, CTO, M&O, Microsoft Corp, who spoke about ‘Innovations in the open source world’, which was then followed by various tracks. Sessions on Day 2 included ‘Success stories’, ‘Databases’, ‘Web app development’ and ‘IT infrastructure management’ as well as workshops on ‘Cross-platform mobile app development’, ‘Programming OpenStack’, ‘Software architecture in 90 minutes’ and ‘HP Helion OpenStack’.

The post-lunch keynote by Kamal Brar, VP, Asia-Pacific, MongoDB, was another hit and was dedicated to the innovations in the FOSS world. The OSI team went around getting as much feedback as possible, and was pleased to find out that everyone was satisfied with the show. Vikram Bhatia, director and technical evangelist, HP Cloud; Ryusuke Kajiyama, MySQL sales consulting manager, APAC; and Jose Miguel Parrella, Microsoft Corp, were interviewed by the OSI team on the second day and they spoke about their careers, their visit to OSI, their ventures and much more. Day 2 as well as the 11th edition of Open Source India ended well, with the hope of taking this event to an even higher level. All the speakers, exhibitors, attendees and the sponsors have extended their support for the 12th edition of OSI.

OSI Days to be back with greater enthusiasm and more information-packed sessions next year. We look forward to see you at OSI 2015.

 

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