 Plot Academy is here to train people on the open-source tools that are the foundation of the cloud. Rackspace is on the cutting edge of the cloud. And we want to bring the training that we provide our own to the general public. This will make the labor pool here in San Antonio better. It will make it more attractive for it to move here. This is going to be great for San Antonio, both in terms of the everyday stuff, like folks coming into the city, spending their money here. But more importantly in the long term, creating a brain tower, creating the community of skilled information technology workers that can support the growth of companies like Rackspace and bring in other companies and start their own. When you are sitting in a historic place, do you know what started right here? Rackspace started right here. But another historic thing that happened on this floor is that right in those behind that glass wall over there is the first three servers of YouTube. And I am so proud to officially welcome each and every one of you to the Rackspace Open Cloud Academy. Rackspace and a lot of other companies in San Antonio, in Texas and around the world need folks who understand the new technology for the cloud. And in a short time period and for low cost, this Open Cloud Academy is going to make many folks enjoyable in our community. So that was a little video from the new Open Cloud Academy that we as a company Rackspace have launched back in the building where Rackspace actually started over a decade ago. So kind of cool that they're kind of giving back to the community now. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. During the talk, my name is Nikki Acosta. I'm a cloud evangelista for Rackspace. I am also the first wear and bearer of an open stack manicure. Believe it folks. I'll show it to you guys afterwards if you want to see it up close. And today is all about solving the open stack talent gap. So how many of you work for companies that are hiring for open stack positions? Everybody, right? We have a big huge problem as a community, right? Private public clouds will produce nearly 14 million jobs worldwide by 2015. So 14 million. Think about that for a second. Here's how you can put this into perspective. If you take every man, woman and child in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, that is still not as many open stack and other cloud jobs that are going to be needed by the end of 2015. To put that in another perspective, if open stack had 30% of the market by 2015 and we wanted to fly everyone to a summit, that would be 19,787 Boeing Dreamliners that would be needed to fly people to a summit. A lot of people, right? There are 1.7 million open cloud jobs worldwide today. So a lot of those are definitely for open stack. And that was a study from Microsoft and IDC that was released in December. So during last year's summit, we talked about open stack jobs that were open relative to some of the other open cloud technologies, right? And I'm happy to say that open stack is still leading the pack. What's even more interesting is that from six months ago to today, there has been an 81% increase in open stack jobs that are posted online. Think about that. At the current rate we're going as a community, we are going to have to train a lot of people and bring a lot more people into this community to make it successful. You were talking about, I'm sorry, I forgot your name. Let's see. Elena. Elena was talking about trying to recruit people in Mexico around open stack jobs. And she's having a hard time doing that. And so part of the proposal today will be to discuss how we can work as a community to bring more people into the community, to train people that might already be working for some of our companies and retrain them with the skills that they need to be able to contribute to open stack, give back to open stack, put products and processes and all these great things around open stack. So top countries that are hiring. United States, UK, India, Canada, China, Russia. There's over 53 countries still that are hiring for open stack positions. So truly a global effort here in terms of talent that is needed. And the top positions are open stack administrator, architect, DC operations, network engineers, engineers and Python developers. Here's an interesting statistic for you. If you look at those top positions as an industry as a whole, let's say you're a systems administrator, if you move to an open stack administrator, to an architect role specific around open stack, you're going to make on average 13% more than the industry standard. So that's a good indication that there's a shortage of jobs and that people who are wanting to bring an open stack talent are willing to pay a premium to have those people join their companies and contribute to this great cause. If we look at the companies that are hiring, it's going to be similar to what we saw six months ago. What we're starting to see now though is a lot of users as well. So over the past few months I've been looking and it's kind of shifted away from only vendors and now we're starting to see people in the financial sector, pharmaceutical sector, some of the gaming sectors start to hire for open stack talent. And the problem that I think we're having is that we're all in a situation where we're recruiting each other, right? I mean, I won't call out Rackspace, but I'm pretty sure that almost every single one of you in here got a LinkedIn invite. And hey, we want smart people, right? So what can we do in the short term and in the long term? So first for the short term, we got to keep our people who are working on open stack engagement happy. This is a DICE survey from March of 2011. What are companies doing to retain at-risk employees? One thing that we're hearing from a lot of the development community, especially as they want flexible schedules, they want to be able to work from home and they want to work on really cool technologies. So what happens a few years from now, maybe three or four years from now when open stack is not the new hot thing, right? What happens to all those innovator types? Do they go away to work on something that's new and exciting? Or do we keep them here engaged on furthering open stack, right? What might convince IT pros to remain in their current position other than salary increases? And we're seeing the same kind of things. People want advancement opportunities. They want flexible schedules and the ability to telecommute. And then, of course, there's nothing I'm out of here. So maybe some disgruntled people taking the survey. But the bottom line here is that you can't assume in your companies that your developers are engaged or happy. Even though they're working on open stack, there are plenty of people that are probably recruiting them every day to come over to their companies. And this is why having a unique company culture or having some of those kind of non-tangible, non-financial benefits are so important to a lot of people. The tech industry, more so than any other industry on the planet, I think, is a very unique industry in the sense that it's kind of come as you are, right? Volunteer your best every day. Address how you want. And do the work that we hired you to do. And that's a lot different. I came from home building and it was a very stark in comparison. And it's funny when we see new rackers come in their first week, they walk in and they're wearing college shirts and pleated pants. And literally, like, second week that they're there, it's flip-flops and shorts. So not taking it for granted that your employees are happy is really, really important. And so one way that Rackspace does that is through engagement surveys. So we send out engagement surveys every few months just to check the pulse of where rackers are and how they're feeling. And if there's things that need to be adjusted, there are. I mean, one of the requests we saw a month ago from our engagement surveys is that someone, like, a large number of people wanted unsweet tea. So our office now has unsweet tea in the front conference room. So that's pretty cool stuff. So just the little nonchangable things that make working in your own respective companies a better place, right? You hear from a lot of the legacy sort of giant IT companies that they're very old school in that sense. They haven't kind of embraced this new come as you are volunteer your best sort of attitude towards their employees. So here's another thing. For those of you who are here for the last panel, there was a really good discussion on what people are doing for meetup groups throughout the ecosystem. And Rackspace is definitely giving back. One of the things that we did recently is we went out to MIT and we trained a bunch of MIT students on our dime. And we did that not specifically for recruiting, not specifically as a marketing player or anything like that, but really we wanted to get OpenStack in the hands of some of the brightest people in tech. And so by doing just that, we were able to get people excited about OpenStack. And now we're starting to see a lot of internships spring out of that program. We're doing the same thing at UTSA. There's computer science and engineering majors who go to get resources right now. And basically they have to put in a ticket, wait for the request to be fulfilled, and maybe weeks or months later, they get their resource for a very short period of time. And so now they're shifting that model and basically building an OpenStack-powered cloud to be able to allow folks within our students and faculty within their campus to actually self-serve to those resources. And for Rackspace, that's going to help us create a blueprint to be able to take this to other schools. Up here, these are kind of the schools that we're working with now. A lot of them are heavy into the open source communities. And we're working with all of them to get internship programs established to bring our training curriculum for OpenStack to each of their respective campuses to get more people excited about this great mission that we're on. And then you guys saw the video. So OpenCloud Academy was an idea that came from Graham Weston. And in Rackspace, at Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, we're having a tremendous time trying to find people to fill the roles that we have open. To the point where there's even, you know, super awesome hiring incentives for those who refer folks to Rackspace. And so one way that we figured we could get around this is to be the school that feeds into Rackspace directly. So you saw the video where we actually had a floor out of the Weston building that was Graham Weston's floor that he originally had given to Rackspace. And they turned it into an OpenCloud Academy where they have learning tracks for those categories that you see up there. And so not only is it an opportunity for folks who are not a part of tech to go and get certified, but it's also for people who have maybe been in the industry for a while and need to freshen up their skills for the cloud world. And so it's a pretty neat endeavor and a neat thing that Graham's doing to kind of bring these people together. They've got support from the city. They work with the city. They're working with a lot of the communities with veterans to get veterans into the school and to be able to give them access to classes using GI bill funds. So kind of neat things that Rackspace is doing that I think all of us can probably take back to our own companies and start in our own local communities. All right, so now long term. I think in order for us to be able to fill this talent gap, we're going to have to get really good at empowering the next generation. My mom works at a technical careers high school in El Paso, Texas. And I called and spoke to the principal last week. And I said, hey, I'm doing this talk on solving the Opusac talent gap. I'm not sure if you know what Opusac is. He didn't. But he said he'd heard of it, but he doesn't know much about it. And so I asked him a few questions. And some of the things that he told me were really surprising to me. First, the student ratio of male to female is still 90 to 1. So it's very, very male oriented in terms of the classes that they're providing are filled with boys and very few girls in their classes. The second is that he felt really strongly that the state is not really doing enough to encourage people to go into technical fields. When kids are little and they're growing up and you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, I said a clown. But you ask these kids what they want to be when they grow up and it's lawyers and doctors and firefighters. Kids don't even know that these things kind of exist, right? All they know is that when they go to use mommy or daddy's iPad and they pull up Nick Jr. or any number one of these kids games or our social networking site, that is just there. But really it's all the stuff that we're doing that powers all the stuff that's going to be coming in the future. And so getting kids involved at a young age through maybe one of these programs up here, getting them these books Python for Kids is kind of a responsibility of all of us, you know? I'm sure a lot of you have kids out there. I do. My kid, when he was two years old, walked up to the TV and started crying because he tried to swipe the TV to change the channel, like an iPad. And I'm like, hey, hey buddy, it's not an iPad. You don't change the channel that way. So a lot of our kids are growing up in this world of tech and I think at least for my generation, I'm 33 years old, when I was growing up computers started appearing in my classroom and it was like a reward if you got to go play Oregon Trail in the one classroom computer, right? One of the other things that this high school teacher told me is that it's kind of interesting to see how the student body has evolved. He said that when we first opened up this career high school and we started having these technical classes, that it was the very, very introverted type of students that would come into these classes. We all know the stereotype of your basement developer sitting around in the dark hacking away and it's really interesting that it's starting to shift. You know, we're starting to see kids who are just really interested in technology come over and they're not necessarily fitting the bill or the stereotype of being introverted. So kind of neat things happening all around in schools today but there's some great folks at Rackspace who are participating in the Girl Start program where she got tennis balls and with tennis balls showed kids how to use or conceptualize APIs and spinning up cloud resources. So really just kind of doing some grassroots efforts in your own communities to kind of enabling that next generation and letting them know, hey, it's okay if you want to grow up and you want to go into a technical field, that's okay. So here's one that I'm really passionate about. Any women in here, part of the women of OpenStack group going to the OpenStack breakfast on Wednesday? Awesome. So there's been a lot of stuff going on the news lately. Especially with Cheryl Sandberg's book and there's one of the women I was talking about. Ann Gentel everybody. There's Ann. You're welcome. So what we're seeing is that even in careers like biology, careers that were typically male-dominated that over the past few decades the sort of ratio of male to female PhDs has kind of equaled out in all places except for tech. So science and engineering are still heavily male-dominated. And so if you look at kind of the overall picture you're only seeing about 12% of the professionals graduating with those fields being women. Which is crazy to me because we actually make up more than half of the population. So my message to those of you who are working in tech is be inviting to women. There's a great case study online Lily sent to me today talking about how Etsy grew their number of female engineers by almost 500%. So it's no secret probably that women make up a majority of e-commerce customers online and Etsy has about an 80% rate of women that are buying stuff from their site. And so they basically created a program to basically put some gender equality into their mix of employees. One of the first things that they did was notice that all the men were kind of sitting on one side of the room and all the women were sitting on the other side of the room so they integrated them. So that was number one. The second thing that they did is they got together with some of the universities and started doing an exchange program where they would bring in students who are about to graduate for a three month program to basically intern at Etsy with a heavy emphasis on recruiting women and they were stunned by the results. They basically increased the number of women in their companies by a bunch, 500%. Some of you might have heard of this too so that tweet on the left, any of you guys seen this? PyCon 2013? I'll try to keep my own opinions about this to myself without going too deep into it but basically here's the story. There was a woman at PyCon, this gal, Ager Richards and she took a picture of guys who were sitting behind her talking about dongles and posted online. She lost her job. One of the guys that she took a picture lost their job. The reasoning for her losing her job was her company simply didn't agree with the fact that she posted it in a public forum. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, oh my gosh, you're on the road all the time. What do you do with your son? It's 2013, guys. Women have careers now. We're not all stay-at-home moms. It's time to break these stereotypes that were women at home cooking with an apron like it's 1950, it doesn't happen anymore. To those people who ask me those questions, I say, hey man, it's 2013. My husband watches my son when I'm gone and when he's gone I watch him. So it's just little things like that that you don't even realize that they could be potentially sexist. I want you to be mindful of that when you're working around women, when you're at conferences like this, to just be mindful that there's women around and that they have a different perspective. Even if you look in this room, I could probably count the number of women in this room on one hand. This is a very male dominated industry but women are a part of it. In order for women to feel comfortable joining this community, being a part of this community, you have to be welcoming and bring them in with open arms. Thank you. To that end I think women have a responsibility too. It's not just men being sexist pigs and all this other stuff, right? That's what some feminists would love to have you believe but Cheryl Samberg to her point, she had some interesting perspectives on this too and I think due to the nature in which women are raised, we kind of have this notion that we need to please everybody, right? And I've caught myself. I've caught myself in meetings. I've been accused of blurting stuff out loud because I do make an extra effort to be heard because in a room full of men, if you want to be heard, you have to speak up. I think that women have, you have to lean in. You have to lean into the table and be a part of the conversation. You can't be afraid of what someone's going to say to you or say about you. It's no secret that women take criticism and negative feedback. It's difficult for them, much more so than men. And so for those of you that have women at the table, it occurs them to be part of the conversation and for you women at the table, speak up. It's your opportunity here to work in the small, dominated industry. It's okay that you have a different perspective. It's okay that you have a different perspective on things and for a lot of companies, especially Fortune 500 companies, the ones that fill their boards with women, their leadership boards, have less chances of failing, less chances of filing for bankruptcy and they're more profitable. And so I think it's good not only for you guys to be inviting to women and for all of us to be inviting to women, but also for women to speak up and have a seat at the table and not be afraid of people judging them or not trying to please everybody. So all that said, here's my proposal for the OpenStack Foundation. Obviously we have a talent gap. We all need to fix the talent gap. We know that there's not many women in OpenStack. We want to fix that problem too. So here are four tenants that I'm going to propose to the OpenStack Summit after this talk. So number one, I propose that we create a full-time position for community talent development coordinator. So basically a dedicated full-time person to help people like Elena, people in other countries to bring together all of the recruiting efforts, all of the development efforts happening with universities, creating programs that work and being able to apply those programs all over the world, but really just putting someone in charge of that, right? This is not a rack space problem. This is not a red hat problem. It's not an HP problem. This is a community problem. It's a global community problem, right? And so we all could benefit from one person that can help kind of keep everything moving in the right direction. The second one is to continue to recognize, fund and promote the women of OpenStack Group. There have been some really great things that have happened, even Ann just kind of last minute pulling together people to put in money so we could bring some female students and some interns to the summit. So companies like Rack Space and other companies kind of chipping in to pay for their travel and their expenses and their entrance here. OpenStack is also hosting a breakfast for all the women of OpenStack. I think events like this are great. I think we just need to keep doing them, and we need to do them not only during the summit, but when we're not at summits, too, in our own communities. The next one, Create and Award Scholarship specifically for women and college students to attend the summits. Kind of already blew that one in the last point. And the last one, Create an online hub for community talent and women's resources on OpenStack.org. So currently you go to OpenStack.org, you click on jobs, there's a huge job page that people can post to. I would like to see a community talent page that also has open source blueprints on how to get OpenStack into the hands of people in your respective communities. Colleges, universities, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, technical colleges, community events and meetups, and then also some women's groups and women's resources. We have a LinkedIn page right now and that's how most of us keep in touch. But really trying to do a little bit more so that women kind of have a landing page with an OpenStack award to go and other women to network with if they want to. Questions? That was 10. Four. Did I say 10? Four more! So if any of you want to stick around, there is an etherpad that was set up. Where's Lily? Is Lily in here? There you are. What's the address? So there's an etherpad set up if you want to sign up there. If you want to, I'm going to create a list here. And for any of those that want to get involved in this talent development or the women's of OpenStack programs, if you want to stick around, I'll take your information. And let's get a mailing list started. Let's get together. Let's get ahead of this, right? Again, it's not just a Raxby's problem. It's all of our problems. If OpenStack is going to win, we need to foster talent and we need to get people involved in OpenStack. You guys enjoy your summit. See you at our party on Wednesday night. Yeah, awesome. See you here.