The open source community converged in Boston this week for the Red Hat Summit. A key theme for this year's event was OpenStack. Cisco presence included an executive keynote, speaking session, and demonstrations of our product and solutions in the partner pavilion.

Ram Appalaraju, VP of Technology and Product Marketing and Solutions Engineering, delivered a keynote on open cloud computing to a full house. Cisco's data center vision is to enable customers to maximize business value from their applications by providing a holistic, programmable fabric based infrastructure that can support any application at any location with massive scalability. Ram also highlighted our commitment to OpenStack, contributions to the open source software community, and how infrastructure matters if your goal is to deliver an elastic, automated cloud computing environment. He even gave a shout out to the hometown Bruins which the audience thoroughly enjoyed.

I was inspired by the amount of people interested in Cisco's products and solutions. There was a steady stream of booth traffic and the audience clearly took note of our new standing as the#2 server vendor worldwide for x86 blades (IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Q1 2013, May 2013, Revenue Share ) with many attendees stopping by the Cisco booth in the partner pavilion wanting to hear and see more about  Cisco UCS, Big Data, and OpenStack on UCS. We also highlighted our technology collaboration by showcasing the Nexus 1000V for Red Hat KVM.

The Red Hat Summit continues to be a great event for anyone looking to increase their understanding of open source technology. Personally, I always enjoy a conference where there are foosball tables, bean bag chairs, donut stations, and a guy wearing a red suit and black cape.

I hope to see you and him next year at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. In the meantime, please go here to learn more about Cisco data center products and solutions.