The End Users in the CNCF Community are the companies and organizations that put our open source technology to work, increasing efficiencies, productivity, and profitability. They are critical to driving innovation that matters, and to keeping our open source ecosystem ever expanding.
That is why we are very excited to welcome Katie Gamanji to CNCF as the new Ecosystem Advocate, where she will help develop and execute programs to expand the visibility and growth of the End User Community. Katie will play an important role in exposing original insights from cloud native end users through formats like the CNCF Tech Radar, which will influence the future of CNCF projects and scale access to this community.
Katie joins CNCF from American Express, where she was instrumental in driving cloud native technology adoption at the company. She has been involved with CNCF since while at Conde Nast, she created a centralized globally distributed platform with Kubernetes as a central piece. Since then, her interest in cloud native tooling has grown tremendously, as have her contributions to the community. In February 2020, Katie was elected to the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) as the end user representative. In this role, she worked with 11 other members to guide and set the technical vision for the CNCF landscape.
CNCF is a foundation focused on end user driven open source, so Katie’s role will be central in continuing to build on an already robust community of over 140 end user members. She will own initiatives end-to-end from conception, to execution, tracking engagement, and operationalizing for growth.
At our most recent event, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU Virtual, 45% of attendees indicated being a part of an end user organization. This is a 10% increase from those in attendance at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019. 3,598 End User companies participated.
The event received 1,525 submissions with an acceptance rate of 16% which resulted in 384 total speakers for the event. Of the accepted speakers, 31% represented an end user company and 69% a vendor company, numbers that were commensurate with the number of speakers that submitted to the CFP. For keynotes, 18% of speakers were from an end user company and 82% a vendor company.
We recently announced the second CNCF Technology Radar, which was created to share valuable knowledge from the CNCF End User Community, including what tools are actively being used, the tools they would recommend, and their patterns of usage. Every quarter a Technology Radar will focus on a different use case, having started with Continuous Delivery and Observability. If you missed it, we encourage you to have a look!