All,
I wanted to take a moment to applaud the community effort at last week's
SNW show in Orlando. As you know, we had a small booth on the expo floor
that included two laptops demonstrating the live code and presentation
slides, as well as representatives from across the community collecting
leads and handing out Aperi t-shirts and trifolds.
We hosted a variety of vendors and end users from all over the globe who
had read and heard about the great progress the project is making. Among
them were Hitachi, Symantec, EMC, Sun, and HP, all of whom were
interested in seeing the live demo. Like other enthusiastic end users,
several AOL employees came by to express their excitement about
deploying the Aperi framework in their environment to overcome some of
the limitations with their existing solution. They responded to the
short survey we created with a resounding "yes" when asked if they would
ever consider using an open source storage offering and were eager to
get their hands on the code.
While AOL, Yahoo, and several other end users were looking forward to
downloading the code as soon as they could get their hands on it, we
spoke to many end users who said they would consider using an open
source solution to manage their storage environments. These details were
captured in the lead generation system we rented and will be available
over the next couple of days to help with our recruitment efforts.
Throughout the show, we were able to generate even more enthusiasm with
both end users and vendors when we showed them the live code, and they
seemed delighted that we had just passed the legal review and that we
would be posting the code libraries to the project page by the end of
the week. Of course, there are always attendees who come by for a free
t-shirt, so we did our best to placate them and send them on their way
with a smile and an encouraging word on the benefits of open source.
Overall, it was a very good show for the project participants to attend,
and we should feel proud of our accomplishments thus far. I want to
extend a special thanks to those who were able to spend time at the
booth visiting with attendees. This, combined with the tabletop displays
and trifolds we had at each of the member booths, went a long way in
demonstrating the inertia of the community. We were able to snap a
couple photos of us talking with attendees, so we can post these to the
Aperi Website, and if any of you would like to volunteer to craft a
short entry on the show for the Aperi blog, please reply. A short
summary of what you experienced at the show is plenty. I can take the
lead with this if someone can help with some additional comments. Please
let me know.
Thanks again to all and let's build on this strong momentum through the
end of this year and into 2007!