Minister for Trade, Tourism and Major Events Stuart Ayres today announced the first Openstack summit to be held in the Southern Hemisphere has been secured for Sydney in 2017.

Mr Ayres said Openstack will be the first major international ICT event to be held in the new convention centre and will allow ICC Sydney to showcase its state-of-the-art technology.

“Openstack has found a great partner in Sydney, we have a global reputation for supporting innovation, the biggest start-up ecosystem in Australia and a strong open source community,” Mr Ayres said.

“The summit will be worth over $16 million in direct expenditure to the State, which is additional to the benefits it will bring to the NSW innovation and the ICT sector.

“It’s expected to attract 5,000 delegates to Sydney over five days, including including developers, users and administrators of Openstack Cloud Software.

“I commend Business Events Sydney (BESydney) for securing major events in the professional services and technology sector that are worth an estimated $71.6 million direct expenditure to the state of New South Wales.

“Sydney has cemented its’ reputation as Australia’s Information and Communications Technology hub and is preparing to host to some of the world’s most important ICT conferences and events.

“Events like Openstack will affirm Sydney’s reputation as a leader in technology,” Mr Ayres said.

The founder of the OpenStack community in Australia, India, Taiwan and Hungary, Aptira, said Sydney was a natural home for the event.

Speaking in Sydney this week at the first OpenStack Day Australia Aptira CEO and Board Director Tristan Goode said Sydney won’t have seen anything like it before.

“When the OpenStack Community meets next year – it will be the single largest gathering of cloud computing techs in t-shirts yet seen in Sydney – sales of comic books will triple, and the ideas they generate will be misquoted by marketing executives for years to come,” Ms Goode said.