As you know, OpenStack:Unlocked is sponsored by Mirantis. We are pleased to bring you this personal note from Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski:

Thanks for giving me a minute. I have served on the OpenStack Board of Directors since it was formed in 2010, staking Mirantis’ future on OpenStack even when few people were sure of what it would become. Now that everyone agrees that OpenStack is “a thing”, we have another hurdle we have to jump over. It’s clear that the power in this space is shifting towards the developer community, and to remain significant in this world, OpenStack can’t be just a me-too to Amazon or VMware. It needs to evolve to make itself relevant to the developer community. I plan to dedicate my board efforts in 2016 to help push our community messaging and technology efforts in that direction.

I’ve spent more than five years making sure that Mirantis contributes to the OpenStack community at every level, from hundreds of developers working on OpenStack projects to building stackalytics.com (which we agreed to contribute to the OpenStack Foundation last year), to launching and helping to maintain DriverLog (which now catalogs over 160 vendor drivers). I also curate and run the OpenStack:Silicon Valley conference and personally oversee Mirantis’ vendor neutral OpenStack Training and Certification program.

I’d like to encourage everybody reading this to be active and vote in this week’s individual election and would greatly appreciate you considering me as a potential candidate. Thank you.

—-  Boris Renski