Open computing and its various aspects for disruption of the current state of things in the tech landscape are under careful scrutiny by companies and enterprises looking to stay ahead of the curve.

And during the gathering in San Jose, California, for this year’s OCP U.S. Summit conference, Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, were happy to welcome a return guest to theCUBE to discuss these topics. James Liao, CEO and cofounder of Pica8, Inc., met with the cohosts to talk about some of the ins and outs of open computing, its ecosystem and networking.

Whiteboxes and open computing

While a lot of ground was covered in the conversation, Liao provided some concise summaries on a few points. An early instance came in his assessment of how open computing had grown since the last OCP Summit: “The biggest change we have seen in the last year is the ecosystem coming together.” He expanded on this by saying, “The ecosystem includes the application, the controller … a lot of platforms. So we’re seeing a lot of players here to push [it] forward.”

Another major point of discussion, one which fed into several other topics covered, was the growing use of whiteboxes. Though Liao admitted, “I think whitebox has a lot of definitions, it’s definitely confusing,” the general-use meaning was that of a software subsystem with visible internals.

From this, Liao proceeded on a consideration of whitebox value and impact to several fields: “If you think about the adoption of the whitebox, there are three segments that are really interesting to all the big movers … The first one is data-centric. Everybody knows that service providers need whitebox … And this is the segment that really knows about how to use the whitebox, not only on the server and storage, but also on the network itself.”

Liao continued, “But if you move … to a different segment, enterprise, [they’re] moving a little slower than the data-centric, because they tend to be more conservative about what kind of service they want to use.” The third point was a “segment that people don’t realize … the OEM business.”

With OEM, he said, “People have to build around networking and compromise with the networking limitation. This is the first time they can just take a whitebox [and] optimize the software for their application. Storage vendors, for example, they really want to optimize networking for their storage, instead of changing storage for networking.”

Encouraging alternatives

The opportunities opened up by such changes are producing some interesting market shifts. Liao noted, “We’re seeing very encouraging signs this past year … in the enterprise market, people looked beyond Cisco, looked beyond Juniper … and look into HP and Dell as alternative providers, not because it’s cheaper, but because they provide certain flexibility, they can optimize their environment, reduce the operation cost and then provide the service.”

Asked to outline three things his company will work on over the next year, Liao itemized, “SDN and whitebox are here, they’re ready. We’re going to see good growth of revenue and the customer base. We will continue to build partnerships … Networking is the barrier, and we have to work together to solve that problem.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE