UPDATED 12:30 EDT / APRIL 01 2015

Unicorns are real in open source | #OCPSummit15 recap

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Open Compute might not be “a sexy topic,” said but it represents the best of “off the charts innovation,” said John Furrier during a live wrap-up segment with Jeff Frick on theCUBE at OCP Summit 2015. Furrier and Frick joined forces to remark on their observations while at the Open Compute Summit. “There’s an ecosystem developing,” continued Furrier, “there are unicorns out here.” He believes that there were Amazon-like companies in attendance. “Open compute gives them instant scale soling all the large-scale complexity problems,” noted Furrier.

 

Open source enables hardware companies to act like software ones

 

Open source for hardware is a little harder to understand than open source for software. “But the open source hardware effort and the architectural design and sharing of best practices is letting people act like software companies in the hardware space,” said Frick. When hardware start ups are enabled to act like software companies, their CAPX [capital expenditure] costs are lower.

Major companies have been contributing to Open Compute in order to encourage adoption of cloud computing. With companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard bringing their proprietary reference implementations and architecture to Open Compute, younger companies have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants. This enables them to get a head start innovating in the “top 20 percent,” according to Furrier, as opposed to spending their time and money building the initial 80 percent. Furrier predicted that this will have “large scale global impact.” He called the Open Compute phenomenon “disruptive and exciting.”

 

A new focus for entrepreneurs

 

With their focus trained on the last 20 percent, Frick observed that the expectations of the entrepreneur have changed. Entrepreneurship has become more about “putting things together that already exist in a different way to solve a unique problem,” said Frick. He continued, citing how in the past, the focus was on being a “really deep expert in a particular technology,” but now, “how you bring them together in innovative ways” is more important. A key observation is that the ability to “play on the edge of different technologies and find ways to bring them together,” said Frick

Riding new waves of innovation

 

Part of finding new ways to bring technologies together is keeping an eye out for the next wave. Both Frick and Furrier predicted that the coming wave will be cloud and IoT [Internet of Things], in addition to “a new type of hardware device.” They suggested that big companies like HP, Microsoft, and Facebook will continue to bring exciting new innovations, like System-on-a-Chip (SoC), to the Open Compute market. Furthermore they said that the software defined datacenter will become “the new normal.”

 

New types of data centers

 

Frick and Furrier agree with previous theCUBE guest Cole Crawford that another cloud is forming in opposition to the current data center trend. In comparison to having a few really large data centers, Crawford predicted that this new type of data center will be “on the edge.”

While these two types of data centers will be different, Furrier suggested that “there will be some common ground.” Since there are “a lot of open source platforms to grow on,” Furrier said, “I believe there’s going to be opportunity when it comes to proprietary differentiated products.” Above all, he stressed, “with virtualization and cloud, it’s about the workload and the value will come from the apps.”

Watch the full segment below, and be sure to check out more from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OCP Summit 2015.

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