With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in two weeks' time at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA - co-located with 2nd International BigDataExpo - let's introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the West Coast conference...

We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing & Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud and/or Big Data solutions that are transforming the world of Enterprise IT?

CLOUD EXPO SPEAKER NAME: John Engates

TWITTER: @jengates

ORGANIZATION: Rackspace Hosting

11TH CLOUD EXPO OPENING KEYNOTE TITLE: An Open Cloud Discussion

KEYNOTE DESCRIPTION: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2368617

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: John Engates is CTO of Rackspace. He joined the company in August 2000, just a year after it was founded, as VP of Operations, managing the datacenter operations and customer-service teams. Two years later, when Rackspace decided to add new services for larger enterprise customers, he created and helped develop the Intensive Hosting business unit

Most recently, Engates has played an active role in the evolution and evangelism of Rackspace’s cloud-computing strategy and cloud products. He meets frequently with customers to hear about their needs and concerns, and to discuss Rackspace’s vision for the future of cloud computing. He is also an internationally recognized cloud computing expert and a sought-after speaker at technology conferences, including CA World, the Goldman Sachs Techtonics Conference in addition to Cloud Expo. He speaks on the future of cloud computing, enterprise cloud adoption, data center efficiency, green data center best practices, and more.

Prior to joining Rackspace, Engates was a founder and General Manager at Internet Direct, one of the original Internet service providers in Texas. John is a graduate of the University of Texas at San Antonio and holds a B.B.A. in Accounting.

BLOG: www.rackspace.com/blog/author/jengates/

RECENT CLOUD COMPUTING QUOTE:

"When we launched OpenStack with NASA just over two years ago, we knew we were onto something. We wanted to create an open-source cloud operating system upon which businesses could power their cloud environments, without getting locked into one provider. That was a bold and aggressive goal. We were aiming for the stars.

But here we are two years later. OpenStack now powers the world’s second-largest public cloud - the one we run at Rackspace - and the OpenStack community continues to grow and thrive. It now comprises 192 companies including HP, IBM and Dell and 5,564 technologists, developers, researchers, and other cloud computing experts."

[From John's Rackspace company blog (Sept  2012)]