Originally posted to TelecomNewsroom

Nick Lippis is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of ONUG, an unbiased, independent community of Global 2000 enterprise technology professionals collaborating to serve as the collective voice of the IT community. As an authority on corporate computing, Nick has designed some of the largest systems in the world. He has advised many Global 2000 firms on IT strategy, architecture, equipment, services and implementation, and is uniquely positioned to comment, analyze and observe industry trends and developments. 

With the ONUG Fall 2019 event occurring soon, we sat down with Nick to discuss ONUG, its initiatives, its benefits and more. 

TelecomNewsroom, Anne Whealdon (TNR-AW) Question: How was ONUG started and how has it evolved over the years?

ONUG, Nick Lippis (O-NL) Answer: ONUG was created in early 2012 as the result of a discussion between co-founders about the need for a user-focused conference where IT executives can share best practices and challenges as they transformed their organizations and infrastructure for the digital economy. From there, we brought together the founding board of IT leaders from the likes of Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Citi and Gap Inc. and created the first ONUG event, held on February 13, 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, and hosted by Fidelity.

Today, ONUG prides itself on functioning as the collective voice of the enterprise IT community. Throughout the year, ONUG organizes working groups that aggregate use case requirements, bringing together enterprise technology executives, academics, researchers, government representatives, standards professionals, open source communities, 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. Ultimately, the ONUG goal is to bring together the full IT community to allow leaders to learn from peers, to make informed open infrastructure deployment decisions, and to create dialogue.

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