With less than two months until kickoff, RICON 2015 is shaping up to be the best RICON ever. Interest in distributed systems has never been higher; we have secured the Westin St. Francis, a fantastic venue ideally located; and now today we get to announce a very strong slate of speakers and sponsors.
The response to the RICON 2015 Call For Speakers was outstanding and the editorial committee had a tough time making selections for the limited speaking slots. We welcome back presenters familiar to RICON audiences, including Christopher Meiklejohn, Machine Zone (RICON 2014), Mark Allen, Riak Technologies (RICON 2014) and Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp (RICON 2014). Academic submissions continue to be outstanding. The accepted submissions include Deniz Altinbüken (Cornell University), Jose Faleiro (Yale University), and Colin Scott (University of California, Berkeley), to name a few.
We listened to attendee feedback, in response to RICON 2014, and have added a track that focuses on Riak In Production. A selection of the accepted submissions include Damien Krotkine (Booking.com), Sean Kelly (Tapjoy), Duncan Grazier (ShopKeep), Noah Gift (Sqor), and Matt Davis (OpenX). We are forever grateful for the contributions our customers continue to make to the development of our products.
An up-to-date list of speakers and what they’ll be speaking about can be found here.
We have not yet finalized keynote presentations, but we are excited by the prospect of Donald Rippert, returning to RICON. Don is a pioneer in championing distributed systems and is currently the General Manager of Cloud Strategy & Business Development at IBM. Also joining us will be Benjamin Hindman of Mesosphere. Ben is one of the original creators of Apache Mesos and was a lead engineer on the Mesos project at Twitter. Adrian Cockcroft, Technology Fellow at Battery Ventures, will also grace the main stage at RICON. In addition, Alex Williams will host the “A Short Stack from The New Stack” panel, comprised of industry experts, including Donnie Berkholz, from 451 Group, and our own Dave McCrory. Stay tuned for more announcements.
Riak would not be able to host RICON without the support of sponsors. Interest this year has been particularly strong, with past sponsors recommitting and new sponsors stepping up. We are honored to welcome back IBM, HP and Cloudsoft as returning sponsors, and are excited to announce Intel and TriFork as a new lead sponsors. TriFork, organizer of the GoTo conferences, has been assisting with logistics. Additional first-time sponsors include Cisco, Comcast, ShopKeep, Mesosphere and 5AM Solutions. Media sponsors include The New Stack, CMSWire, Qcon and InfoQ. A great roster of sponsors means more resources for great parties – RICON 2015 is shaping up well!
With returning speakers, sponsors and even a former CEO, RICON 2015 is leveraging its past as a strong foundation and roaring back with some fantastic new additions. I hope you can join us in San Francisco from November 4th through 6th. Please book your accommodation and tickets as soon as possible. Rooms can be booked here and the room rate of $279 won’t last long. Early bird conference rates are available until the end of September here – and if you know someone at Riak reach out as they can get you a discount code for a further $100 discount until the end of September.
Follow @RICONconf for updates. Conference agenda will be posted on riak.com before the end of September. Hope to see you at RICON 2015!
Stephen Condon
Sr. Director of Marketing
@streamingguy
