IBM and Red Hat, Inc. share a view that openness drives innovation in the marketplace, and that approach has led to an 11-year partnership.

“No one company owns the innovation model,” Doug Balog, vice president and general manager at IBM Power Systems, said during an interview with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman at Red Hat Summit 2015.

Tremendous forces at play in the marketplace

Balog described “tremendous forces at play in the marketplace,” including a shift to data, move to the Cloud, and ways firms engage with their employees and clients. These forces are creating a
“big shift” at IBM, one that “brings together all our capabilities around a key set of growth areas.” Balog mentioned focusing on infrastructure, analytics and security. In addition, he discussed middleware and how to“bring the best of IBM software, storage together … for the first time. A lot of change underfoot,” Balog warned.

In regards to OpenPower and server technology, IBM is “going to take all the concepts of open-source software and take that to open-source hardware.” Balog said “stealing” from the open-source software has been “at the heart of” the development of OpenPower. “It’s about creating a supply chain that serves the hyperscale data center space,” he declared. Keeping with the community theme, IBM will be utilizing a number of advisers to continue innovating and moving forward quickly with OpenPower.

OpenPower is “a bit like ODM, except that … we’ve released the specs [and] firmware … that these companies are surprising us sometimes.” Balog recalled that 15 companies came with OpenPower to the Summit in San Jose. He called the phenomena “community-based — they just grab it and run with it, which is very different from the ODM model.”

The monetization phase

Balog described Spark as a “disruptive technology” and “next wave of the … language of data.” He said that many developers will be using Spark on OpenPower moving forward. Balog called the next step in development the “monetization phase” in which companies ask, “How do we start to take that open innovation and bring it to market [and] to customers?”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE