The Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON), presented by IT-oLogy, will bring together the biggest names and companies in the information technology (IT) industry to discuss the latest issues for developers, executives, government leaders and educators. World-class speakers like Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the most influential people in the history of technology, will be featured along with many others.
Top companies like Twitter, Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, HP, Google, Homeland Security, Apache, Rackspace, EMC and FireHost will also attend and participate.
POSSCON will be held at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center March 28-29, and will feature track sessions, hands-on training and social and networking events. Tracks will include Education, Technical, Big Picture and Demo/Training.
Other speakers include Dr. Douglas Maughan, Director, Department of Homeland Security, Cyber Security Division; Jim Jagielski, Co-Founder and President, Apache Software Foundation; Chris Aniszcyck, Open Source Manager, Twitter, Inc.; and many others.
Started in 2008, POSSCON is an annual gathering of industry experts, thought leaders, IT decision makers, software programmers and educators around the topic of open source. The conference has steadily grown since it began, and in 2011 approximately 500 people from 24 states attended, 30 colleges and universities and more than 100 private and government organizations were represented. Open source is a philosophy and methodology based on making source code available and redistributable.
Major sponsors include IBM, IT-oLogy, OpenStack, Verizon Wireless, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina and the City of Columbia. Others include Canonical, Chipco Computer Distributors, Inc., FireHost, GitHub, Google, Health Sciences South Carolina, Hewlett Packard Company, Linode, OpenSource.com, Oracle, Percona, Inc., Rackspace Hosting, Red Hat, SkySQL, SPARC, SUSE and TM Floyd & Company.
Developers, executives, government leaders and educators will all benefit from attending POSSCON. Registration is available at www.posscon.org.