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Basho Announces Keynotes and Other Speakers for RICON 2014
[September 25, 2014]

Basho Announces Keynotes and Other Speakers for RICON 2014


HERNDON, Va. --(Business Wire)--

Basho Technologies, the creator and developer of Riak, the industry leading distributed NoSQL database, today introduced keynote speakers and a preliminary speaker list for RICON 2014, the distributed systems conference hosted by Basho. This year's event will feature keynote speakers: Mark Interrante, SVP of engineering, HP Helion; Marten Mickos, SVP and general manager of cloud, HP (previously CEO of Eucalyptus); and Mac Devine, director of cloud innovation and CTO, IBM (News - Alert) Cloud Services Division.

"We are thrilled to have attracted such an influential lineup of speakers at this year's RICON conference," said Adam Wray, CEO of Basho. "Mark, Marten and Mac all have extensive experience in the open source, infrastructure software and cloud industries, so it will be interesting for attendees to hear their perspectives on distributed systems trends. This year's RICON is shaping up to be the biggest yet and we hope our attendees gain valuable insights as they build out their scalable database initiatives."

Interrante, Mickos and Devine have experience leading cloud and software enterprise companies in distributed systems and are sought-after speakers at industry events. Their keynote presentations will be introduced by Wray and Basho CTO, Dave McCrory. Speakers will cover topics such as the state of open source, big data, IoT and public and private clouds all within the context of distributed systems.

  • Mark Interrante, SVP of engineering, HP Helion, has more than 14 years of VP-level product development experience with Internet companies ranging from startups to global Fortune 500s. Prior to joining HP in early 2014, he was SVP of product at Rackspace (News - Alert) where he helped invent, design, build and operate the world's largest open cloud.
  • Mac Devine, director of cloud innovation and CTO, IBM Cloud Services Division, has more than 20 years of experience with networking and virtualization. Before joining IBM in 2008, he started the zCloud Innovation team and served as its chief architect. Devine is an IBM Master Inventor and a member of IBM's prestigious Academy of Technology.
  • Marten Mickos, SVP and general manager of cloud, HP, is a veteran of open source, infrastructure software and global businesses, served as CEO of Eucalyptus (now in agreements to be acquired by HP) and will join HP as SVP and general manager of cloud. Previously, he was CEO of MySQL AB where he grew the company from a garage startup to the second largest open source software company in the world.

"RICON is a significant gathering of the distributed systems industry, bringing together luminaries from vendors to end users to academia," said Devine. "I look forward to being a part of this year's conference and interacting with other members of the cloud ecosystem at the show. My focus will be to get at the center of how cloud services will transform in the evolution of distributed systems."

The preliminary speaker list is posted on the RICON site, ricon.io. Speaker sessions are expected from the following organizations : AdRoll, Alert Logic, Basho Technologies, Bitly, Braintree - a PayPal Company, Chartbeat, Cloudsoft, Comcast, Dataloop.io, Google, HashiCorp, MIT (News - Alert) CSAIL, OpenX, Percona, Riot Games, SWI-Prolog, Two Sigma, UC Berkeley, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Universidade do Minho, University of Kaiserslautern, UPMC/INRIA, Yahoo!. Below are highlights of a few of the speakers and their sessions.



  • Peter Alvaro is a doctorate candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is advised by Joseph M. Hellerstein. His principal research interests are databases, distributed systems and programming languages. His session will be: Outwards from the Middle of the Maze: Using Lineage to find Bugs at Scale.
  • Armon Dadgar is CTO of HashiCorp, where he is focused is on the real-world application of distributed systems to solve problems, specifically in the world of DevOps and application orchestration. His session will be: Consul: Service Oriented at Scale.
  • Aysylu Greenberg works at Google (News - Alert). In her spare time, she works on open source projects in Clojure, ponders the design of systems that deal with inaccuracies, paints and sculpts. Her session will be: Benchmarking: You're Doing It Wrong.
  • Alex Heneveld is the CTO of Cloudsoft and brings 20 years of experience designing software solutions in the enterprise, start-up and academic sectors. His session will be: Using Clocker to Deploy and Manage Distributed Applications in a Docker Cloud, and is co-presented with Andrew Kennedy, a senior engineer for Cloudsoft.
  • Neha Narula is a doctorate candidate at MIT, building fast, scalable multi-core and distributed systems. Her session will be: Multicore and Distributed Systems: Sharing Ideas to Build a Scalable Database.
  • David Pick is a software engineer at Braintree, a PayPal (News - Alert) company, and currently leads Braintree's data engineering team to solve problems around data access and performance at scale. His session will be: Building a Real-Time Data Pipeline with Clojure and Kafka.

RICON will take place October 28-29 at the Palms Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. It will also feature a training day called Build a Cloud Day presented by Citrix Systems, Inc., on October 27, which is a program designed to expose attendees to the concepts and best practices around deploying cloud computing infrastructure. RICON immediately follows with two days of distributed systems keynote presentations, in-depth sessions, technical tracks, panel discussions, cocktail events and more. A discounted registration price is available for the next 48 hours with bit.ly/RICONPR.

Supporting Resources


About RICON

RICON is a distributed systems conference hosted by Basho. It brings together developers, industry leaders, partners, customers and community members to discuss all the ways they apply distributed systems and networks, and see innovations in the industry. RICON 2014 is being held October 28-29 at the Palms Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. For more information, visit ricon.io.

About Basho Technologies

Basho is a distributed systems company dedicated to making software that is highly available, fault-tolerant and easy-to-operate at scale. Basho's distributed database, Riak, the industry leading distributed NoSQL database, and Basho's cloud storage software, Riak CS, are used by fast growing Web businesses and by one third of the Fortune 50 to power their critical Web, mobile and social applications, and their public and private cloud platforms.

Riak and Riak CS are available open source. Riak Enterprise and Riak CS Enterprise offer enhanced multi-datacenter replication and 24×7 Basho support. For more information, visit basho.com.


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