Open-source software is one of the hottest commodities in IT these days. Customers love the choice and flexibility open-source offers, and they are gobbling up new software as fast as developers can create it. With the huge increase in interest in OpenPOWER over the past year, we are about to see what open can do deeper in the stack.

John Zannos, chairman of the OpenPOWER Foundation, along with Calista Redmond, the Foundation’s president, are optimistic that this will be a breakout year for OpenPOWER.

Redmond told David Floyer (@dfloyer), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that OpenPOWER is bringing something very novel to the hardware space. According her, OpenPOWER is “kind of bringing the ideology and the meritocracy of open-source software down into the hardware layers. So that includes things like board design; it includes ship design.”

If it’s good enough for Google …

Zannos spoke about Google’s announcement and what that foreshadows for OpenPOWER. “Google obviously is talking about Power9 [an IBM processor] and announced some plans that they’ll continue to share over time,” he said, adding that this speaks broadly to the wide adoption of alternative platforms.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE