ONUG Fall: Why We Are Virtual

First, I want to thank all of our great ONUG Sponsors for being a part of and supporting our growing community of IT professionals and increasingly open source developers. ONUG Sponsors continued to support the community as we all navigated the pandemic. They helped keep the community together during challenging times, and we thank them for this support.  

The one question I always get from potential and existing sponsors is “when are you going back to in-person.” For ONUG Fall, my response is quick: the community is unable to meet in person this autumn. We get such great insight from the ONUG Board. Fewer than 10% know when and how their offices will open. Nearly 100% don’t have visibility when visitors will be allowed in their offices. This means that corporations are still developing policy for hybrid, remote and onsite office work environments. Nearly 100% have had travel budgets pulled last year and again this year. We could organize a hybrid event for this fall, but we know that many IT professionals in the community would not be able to attend in-person, and many, if not all, sponsors would be disappointed.   

The ONUG Sponsor community is itching to get back to in-person meetings. These organizations built their businesses with in-person meetings. I get it; I too look forward to seeing community members, but 2021 is not the right time. When we produce an ONUG Conference, we take into account the entire community of sponsors, IT executives and speakers. The best visibility we have is that spring of 2022 is the time when travel budgets will be reinstated plus work environment policy established. This could change, but this is the best view presently.

Once this is certain, when we do go back to being in-person, every ONUG Conference will be hybrid. In 2020, the community grew by a factor of 4, and from ONUG Fall 2020, we saw the average time spent at ONUG skyrocket from an average of 4 hours to ONUG Spring 2021’s nearly 11 hours on average. There will be a bifurcation in the community based upon preference. Some will prefer to experience ONUG remotely while others want to be there in-person. We’ll offer both experiences.   

So ONUG Fall 2021 will be virtual and our largest gathering ever, with 5,000 plus community members attending. DXC Technologies, the largest IT consultancy, a Fortune 500 company with nearly $20 billion of 2020 revenues with some 138,000 employees will be the ONUG Fall Host, thanks to longtime ONUG Board member Chris Drumgoole, CIO at DXC Technologies. ONUG Spring 2021 was big; ONUG Fall will be massive, global and cover the most important issue in the industry: how to build, run and secure your enterprise cloud.  

There will be an industry first multi-cloud demonstration of the ONUG Collaborative Decorator.  For the first time, CSPs Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud will demonstrate a common dictionary and schema for the messaging of security logs, events, alerts and alarms that are easily consumed in SIEMs/SOARs and data lakes. This open source project expands ONUG’s role in the industry from that of a community of IT executives aggregating requirements to an open community that is building the connective tissue between private and public clouds. There will be demonstrations, training, education, certification and expansion of the Decorator to support on- and off-prem security messages. For the first time, our industry is on the cusp of creating a common information model that starts with security.   With a common information model, enhancement is possible, AI can be applied across a much broader spectrum of operational domains gaining deeper and wider automation and enabling safer digital enterprises.  

If you attended an ONUG Conference previously then we welcome you back. If you’re new to ONUG, we look forward to meeting you. If you’re a developer then we welcome your contribution to the Collaborative and its Decorator.  

I look forward to meeting with you virtually on October 20th and 21st for ONUG Fall.

 

Author's Bio

Nick Lippis

ONUG Co-Founder/Co-Chair

xxx