Mertic is Director for ODPi, R Consortium, and Open Mainframe at the Linux Foundation, with background in building technology partnerships at Bitnami and SugarCRM. He has an Open Source background, being community manager at SugarCRM, board member at OW2, president of OpenSocial, and frequent conference speaker worldwide. As an avid writer, he has published numerous articles and authored the books "The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications" and "Building on SugarCRM".