Stefanie Chiras, director of Scale-out Power Systems at IBM, told theCUBE during IBM Edgge2015 that big changes are underway.

“As you can tell from the Power portfolio, we’ve made drastic changes since April of last year,” she said. “We’ve changed the strategy, we’ve fully embraced open, that’s been a big part of the shift in POWER … And today we’re very pleased to be launching our PurePower offering, which is our next generation to PureFlex. So it’s a rapid-to-deploy, fast time to client value, converged infrastructure offering built with Power 8 technology. [It] leverages open APIs to allow flexibility going forward, so it’s really taking our strategy and bringing converged to the next level.”

A commitment to ‘open’

The move to an open infrastructure is more than just a side project, Chiras said. It changes the company’s approach to everything.

“Our commitment to open is really what I view as revolutionary,” she said. “We’ve now made Power the most open platform, server platform, in the industry. Our Open Power ecosystem … we’re over 120 members strong now … [at] not even two years old.”

This ecosystem promotes innovation, community and a broader view of the market. It also increases the flexibility of the system for customers.

“Years back, we had that whole ‘optimized solutions,’ where you had hardware that was workload optimized systems,” she said. “And the challenge with that was you went after a pinpoint workload, and you built this entire hardware in order for that one workload, and boy, you had to pick right. With openPOWER, what we’ve done is put in some baseline technology, such as capping, which allows accelerator attachments to be linked directly into the processor and leverage data in a coherent fashion.”

Allowing room for community contributions

This allows room for community contributions: “You can have all the open power partners build accelerators for any workload, so a community, not just IBM, but a community of innovators, can bring accelerators to the platform,” Chiras added.

This new tech landscape is “all about differentiation,” and it’s about providing that differentiation “in a way that’s adaptable and easy to change so you can keep up with the changing IT world.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.