This week’s Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in San Jose attracted some of the industry’s most prominent figures, including none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to set out a vision for hyperscale computing, an emerging paradigm that holds the potential to break Amazon’s iron grip on the cloud. But while the path has already been laid, the ecosystem is only now taking its first steps towards realizing this ambition.

Kicking off theCUBE’s opening segment on Day 1 of the event, SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier likened the Open Compute Project to a “modern day version” of the iconic Homebrew Computer Club, a pioneering hobbyist group that helped usher in the PC revolution. Only this time, the revolution is happening in the data center, where the traditional limitations of physical infrastructure are being pushed aside as the cloud drives consolidation throughout the stack. Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer sees this trend disrupting the enterprise.

“By pulling together hardware, software and applications into SMEs [single manageable entities], you manage the cost,” he explained later in the session. “You can then go on up the stack and add on middleware, databases and applications to reach economies of scale by having single SMEs as high up the stack as you can. This drives innovation in multiple ways,” enabling organizations to improve operational efficiency and achieve the scale needed to tap into their growing information troves.

However, while the technology required for this level of elasticity is beyond the reach of all but the largest companies, Big Data continues to advance at an unrelenting pace, leaving a widening gap in the market that Amazon has already begun to fill. And this is what it all boils down to: “the world wants to replicate the Amazon public cloud, and I think a lot of the activity here is designed to do that,” Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante told Furrier during theCUBE’s wrap up segment, nearly half a dozen interviews later.

See the Intro and Wrap segments, and everything in between, in this playlist covering our entire show from #OCPSummit:

To compete with the public cloud giant, contenders will have to “take the hardware handcuffs off” and “create a situation where the infrastructure can run any software,” according to Vellante. That holds true for both the Open Compute Project and traditional vendors such as IBM and EMC, which are taking it a step further and differentiating where Amazon couldn’t.

“This notion of an integrated stack in the cloud – full DevOps – really works,” Furrier said. “You’re seeing the incumbent folks take advantage of that and saying ‘Hey, I can do that and do a little bit more’ because Amazon is not truly ready for the enterprise.” The OCP community will have to deliver an equally compelling value proposition in order to cross the chasm into mainstream IT.

“You need scale, you need a data center OS, you need a development platform, you need an ecosystem (OpenStack clearly plays a big part in that), you need apps, and as you said, you need an integrated stack with open APIs. And that’s how this community attacks the white space in the enterprise,” Vellante elaborated.

The Open Compute Project is poised to continue its growth streak as the rise of unstructured information pushes more and more organizations, especially large enterprises, into adopting an open source mindset to infrastructure. “The notion of what’s under the hood is being retooled in real time, it’s a reset, a reset of hardware,” Furrier concludes. “It’s going to enable the software-defined trend across the board: cloud, on-premise, Internet of Things.”

Access all of theCUBE’s interviews and commentary from OCP V (2014) including Intro, Wrap Up and everything in between here.