Microsoft has long dabbled in consumer electronics, starting with computer accessories in the ‘80s and eventually working its way up to consoles and mobile devices, but Redmond never ventured into the data center hardware market. That is, until this week. The software titan took the industry by surprise with the decision to donate its server and rack designs – along with purpose-built management software – to the Open Compute Project.

The move marks a major change in direction for Microsoft, and according to Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer, an equally significant milestone for hyperscale. In his latest piece, Floyer details that the company’s contributions provide a major boost to the initiative by expanding the range of supported workloads to include search, communications and general purpose computing. More important, OCP now has an application programming interface (API) that integrates hardware-level management functionality into the software-led infrastructure layer, a role that is being filled by OpenStack.

Floyer believes that Microsoft’s participation “catapults OCP from a contender to favorite to become the de facto standard for the hyperscale open source hardware market, particular for cloud providers and data center service providers.” The way he sees it, the company is assuming an active role in the development of open standards as part of a broader push to gain ground against rivals Amazon and Google and grow its foothold in the data center.

“By embracing OCP and including hardware in a total solution, Microsoft has enabled multiple channels for selling and supporting Application and middleware “Single Managed Entities” (SME), both for their own cloud and for other cloud service providers,” Floyer observes. “Microsoft can use this to increase volume, and gain from analytic driven automation of provisioning, operations and break-fix across software and hardware by treating the whole stack as an SME.”

Floyer predicts that hyperscale computing will enable “globally connected mega data centers” in the enterprise and for data brokers and service providers. Data will move closer to the cloud as a result, enabling users to drive more value from their IT investments and reduce operational costs. He estimates that Open Compute, bolstered by OpenStack, will keep Amazon and Google from completely taking over this market.

Floyer advises enterprise and government CIOs to stop throwing money at existing infrastructure and refocus on creating a “data-led topology based on services located in global mega data centers.”