Like the city in which we are meeting, the Barcelona OpenStack Summit feels both old and new at the same time.

Barcelona is a new venue for the bi-annual Summit and as usual, there are an impressive number of first time attendees. But there is also a very familiar feel to the Summit this time — after all, this is the 14th such Summit, the fifth international Summit and the fourth outside North America. The Summits are now mainstream tech conferences — which makes sense, since OpenStack is a mainstream enterprise technology.

This was reflected in the themes of the first day’s keynotes.

Mark Collier, chief operating officer for the OpenStack Foundation, kicked the Summit off by reviewing findings from 451 Research’s latest study: that OpenStack has become a versatile and reliable platform used for “work that matters” across varying industries. Fully 80 percent of the companies running OpenStack are not technology companies, as demonstrated by morning keynotes highlighting use cases from banking, media, telecom and scientific research.

Each use case reinforced that OpenStack is being used to build software that solves big problems.

To read more about day 1 of the Barcelona OpenStack Summit, please click here to go to my article on the Rackspace blog site.