ONUG comprises unbiased, independent, top enterprise technology leaders who collaborate to:

ONUG was created in early 2012 as the result of a discussion between co-founders Nick Lippis, of the Lippis Report, and Ernest Lefner, formerly of Fidelity Investments, about the need for a user-focused conference where IT executives can share best practices and challenges as they transformed their IT infrastructure for the digital economy.

From there, the two brought together the founding board of IT leaders from the likes of Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Chase, UBS and Gap Inc. Managed by Nick and Ernest, the board worked together to create the first ONUG event, held on February 13, 2013, at the Fidelity Auditorium in Boston, Massachusetts.

During the winter of 2019, Gene Sun, James Beeson and Daniel Conroy, CIOs of FedEx, Cigna and CTO of Raytheon Technologies respectively founded the ONUG Collaborative with Nick Lippis, co-founder and co-chair of ONUG. Its charter is to identify and provide solutions to cross-industry enterprise issues such as cybersecurity and data protection, which are significant areas of concern to large corporations. The first project of The Collaborative was to organize a working group focused on automating cloud governance. The Collaborative now comprises 8 Working Groups in total and are open to cloud vendors, cloud providers and IT executives.

The ONUG Board has grown to include Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Cigna, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, FedEx, Fidelity, Gap Inc., GE, Intuit, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, TD Ameritrade, UBS, Oath/Yahoo, Kaiser Permanente, eBay and State Street Bank. ONUG prides itself on functioning as the collective voice of the enterprise IT community. Throughout the year, ONUG Collaborative Working Groups aggregate use case requirements, bringing together IT executives, academics, researchers, government representatives, vendors and cloud/service providers to contribute to the advancement of products and services required for an open cloud-based software-defined market to develop at scale.

The ONUG semiannual conferences function as a product and reflection of the work being done in the working groups throughout the year. The conferences include keynotes from enterprise IT business leaders as they address their open software-defined cloud-based infrastructure journeys, updates from the ONUG Working Group members, hands-on tutorials and interactive labs, real-world use cases, proof of concept (PoC) demonstrations and a vendor technology showcase. As dictated by recent events, ONUG has transitioned from face-to-face-only events to a combination of in-person events and digital conferences.

The goal of all ONUG events and Working Groups is to bring together the full IT community to allow IT business leaders to learn from peers, to make informed open infrastructure deployment decisions, and to create dialogue between the vendor and user communities to collectively drive open infrastructure choices and options via aggregated use case requirements.