The OCP Summit 2016 has been a bustling affair, with heavy hitters like Goldman Sachs, Facebook and even Google showing up to get the scoop on Open Compute innovation. Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, assessed the summit regarding the overall tone and highlights.

Miniman said he had a particularly interesting conversation with Kevin Lee of Facebook about machine learning and artificial intelligence. According to Lee, processing times can be cut down by orders of magnitude with automation said the possibility of cutting out human intervention from all sorts of operations could result in huge profit savings.

Miniman agreed that hardware should synthesize with automation to make these benefits possible and keep producing “faster processors, all those GPUs to be able to crank through all the data.”

Miniman also said that cloud management companies are still grappling with pulling different elements of hybrid cloud models together.

Some hardware companies are struggling to differentiate from Open Compute, but for others, the trend is inclusion and adoption. “They’re struggling to support OCP,” Miniman said of hardware companies Dell, Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Bifurcation of the data center was another big topic of discussion at the summit, according to Miniman, who said IoT with data at the edge was a major example among many others. “As always with IT, there’s a huge spectrum of what we see going on,” said Miniman.

Differentiation challenges

“The differentiation is tough,” Miniman said about the struggle companies face in differentiating their Open Compute systems.

Frick agreed and remarked that software seems to offer the most room for companies to experiment and create freely. “Software continues to be the place that offers the most opportunity for differentiation,” said Frick.

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