 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals I'm Laura Nolan coming to you from ITW 2020 Joining me today is Dirk van Slyke vice president and chief marketing officer at the open compute project foundation or OCP Welcome Dirk to JSA TV. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited Well Dirk for those who don't already know if you could tell our viewers about the open compute project foundation or OCP Yeah, OCP as it is more commonly known as is basically a community of organizations who Have open source hardware development on specifically around the data center space but all the way to the edge So it's organizations that are open sourcing their technologies and collaborating to increase the pace of innovation around hardware and as well as software and firmware You are attending ITW this year and you know a lot about virtual events OCP recently hosted its annual global summit as a Huge virtual event. Can you tell us a little bit about the 2020 OCP virtual summit? Yeah, thank you Yeah, it was quite a pivot that we had to make because we Unfortunately had to cancel our global summit that was a six take place in March And we knew that we needed to capture the momentum of all the content that had been created We literally canceled that event on a Friday when we were supposed to start up on Tuesday So all the content was ready. We were ready to go But it was just a matter of migrating over to a new platform And so luckily we we chose a good partner We had great teamwork from our volunteer community as well as the staff and some other partners And we were able to pull it off within about 60 days of when we're supposed to have the in person event And so it was a great event. We had great Engagement we ended up with a much higher audience than if we would have had it in person Which was a benefit for our sponsors and attendees alike. So we think it was a success, but we definitely learned a lot in the process Definitely a huge success for for the virtual event. So now tell us what is the rest of 2020 look like for OCP? So that's a great question, you know, again, we want to continue the momentum You know, our key objective here is adoption and bringing together Buyers and sellers in our marketplace because we want people to contribute in this stuff It's got to get out there because it's really making a difference when people are implementing OCP based technologies And so we want to continue the momentum and continue to serve as a framework for that collaboration And so, you know, our our objectives are that, you know, based around events is going to be that they're virtual until further notice You know until organizations start allowing their their employees to start attending larger events You know, we're in the process of migrating all of our methodologies over to virtual only events for the meantime And then, you know, hoping that we'll be able to get back to face-to-face events in the spring of 2021 when we've got our global summit Okay, lots happening from OCP. Where can our viewers go to learn more, Dirk? The best place to go is to go to our website because you can basically connect to everything so it's opencomputed.org And one of the best ways to interact with OCP and the rest of the community is to start participating in the projects So we've got a series of projects as well as subject sub projects that are all based on Specific technical specifications and technologies and there's a lot of choices for you to choose from in that place But sign up for the mailing list get involved in the projects And that's really where you find where all the challenges are the problems that people are trying to solve and the solutions that are bringing to bear And that's the best place to collaborate Lots of ways to get involved. Well, thank you Dirk for joining us today. We appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you And thank you viewers for tuning into JSA TV and JSA podcast. Happy networking