Openstack, Open source, and Building Companies with Steve Poitras

Steven has over 8 years of experience in the IT and High-Tech industries. His core competencies include Next Generation Infrastructure design, project planning and strategy; all with a focus on delivery.

He is currently a Principle Solution Architect at Nutanix where he is helping disrupt the infrastructure space with their revolutionary scale-out storage/compute appliance for private cloud and virtual infrastructure designed by engineers from Google, Asterdata, Oracle, and VMware. Not to mention the author of the Nutanix Bible (http://nutanixbible.com/)!

Prior to this he was one of the key solution architects at the Accenture Technology Labs where he was focused in the Next Generation Infrastructure (NGI) & Next Generation Datacenter (NGDC) domains. In these spaces he has developod methodologies, reference architectures and frameworks focusing on the design and transformation to agile, scalable, and cost effective infrastructures which can be consumed in a "service-oriented" or cloud like manner. Serving as a foundation for these deigns, Steven has over 6 years of experience in the virtualization space with a core focus on the architecture design and implementation for cloud and desktop computing.

He is greatly involved in the technology industry and motivated to keep it moving forward. Testament to this is a home lab allowing for hands on experience as well as participation in many beta programs, professional groups and societies.

Steven graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Business Administration - Information Systems. During his tenure he was the President of the university's Business Information Technology Society (BITS). This blend of business with technology allows Steven to base his decisions with technical expertise while focusing on providing the business with value.

Steven's goal is to become the CIO of a fortune 500 company.

Specialties:--Infrastructure Implementation--
Nutanix, Cisco VMDC, VCE Vblock, FlexPod, HP CloudSystem, Cisco UCS,Cisco Nexus, NetApp FAS, Arista switches
--Platform Architecture--
VMware vSphere, vCloud Director & View, Citrix XenDesktop & XenApp, Hadoop (Cloudera & HortonWorks), Windows Server, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Manager (CLM), Remote Desktop Services, KMS, RightScale, Amazon EC2 / S3, DNS, Active Directory, Group Policy, ITILv3
--Programming Languages--
PowerCLI / Powershell, SQL, Obj-C, Bash, XML

Come hang out with "The Dude" in the learn-lab. Who knows how crazy things will get when Steve is in town. Guaranteed good round table discussion probably well into the night.