Society today runs on information, and the tech world is no small part of this data revolution. However, it’s easy to forget that these programs and online services people use every day all run on black boxes, blinking away in a room somewhere. This is the data center, the core of computing technology in the modern world. While data centers have traditionally run on software and hardware from monolithic vendors, new technologies from the open-source community are creeping in under the door.

To shed some light on open source in the data center, Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke with Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO, Inc. and the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project Foundation, during the OCP U.S. Summit 2016 conference in San Jose, California.

The word and the money

The conversation started off by mentioning how open source has spread through the community. Crawford pointed to what the Open Compute Project has been able to do in the previous year. He also praised the massive amount of potential and momentum in the project.

Regardless of potential, at the end of the day, open source needs to make money. Monetization, Crawford said, is purely about innovating. No one company has it all figured out, because the world of IT is too big. “In hardware-land, partnerships matter,” he said.

Lessons learned

Hyperscale companies, Crawford said, are consolidating their products and interfaces. It’s something that’s happening in the data center as well. Businesses don’t need to reinvent the wheel, he said, but they do need to provide a common abstraction layer so everyone can work together. Companies need to be able to manage their infrastructure in a common, agnostic way so they can get on with the real business of the applications they run.

No one vendor has all the solutions. Crawford called it “co-opetition,” where companies compete in some areas and cooperate in others. Infrastructure costs are huge, he said, so why not rely on an industry that wants to raise the tide for all boats? In the end, he said, companies need to consider the data center as a whole, not just in cost per cloud, but also in real terms of cost per square foot and cost per hour.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OCP U.S. Summit 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE