Since its launch five years ago, Facebook Inc.’s Open Compute Project has produced dozens of hardware designs that helped drive billions of dollars in infrastructure savings at the social network and other companies. But Microsoft Corp. still sees room for improvement.

The software giant will attempt to nudge the initiative in a new direction this week by contributing Project Olympus, a set of server building blocks inspired by its experience with using OCP gear internally.

The company joined the initiative in 2014 and has since become one of its most active proponents. According to a blog post by Kushagra Vaid, the head of the technology giant’s cloud infrastructure team, over 90 percent of the machines that it purchases these days are based on designs from the consortium. Microsoft also has offered technology in the form of blueprints such as its SONiC switching kit.

At first glance, Project Olympus isn’t too different from the company’s previous contributions. It consists of a universal motherboard that can be used in a variety of server configurations, a high-availability power supply with backup batteries and a number of chassis schematics. But whereas Microsoft’s earlier submissions were more or less complete, Vaid wrote in his post that the new kit is only about 50 percent complete.

The company hopes to set an example for other members of OCP, which have historically also contributed mostly finished blueprints, and start a shift towards a more community-driven design approach. Microsoft’s end-goal is to push the initiative toward operating more like open-source software projects, where contributors work more directly with one another. Vaid wrote that such a model could help speed up the development of new hardware designs and help manufacturers bring commercial implementations to market faster.

Bill Carter, chief technology officer of the Open Compute Project Foundation, expressed similar enthusiasm about Microsoft’s plan in a prepared quote. “Microsoft is opening the door to a new era of open source hardware development,” he said. “Project Olympus, the re-imagined collaboration model and the way they’re bringing it to market, is unprecedented in the history of OCP and open source datacenter hardware.”

As one of the industry’s biggest users of OCP-based gear, Microsoft stands to directly benefit from the improvements that its contribution is set to bring. The company has already contributed the specifications for a number of key components, including the universal motherboard, and will release the rest in coming weeks.

Image courtesy of Microsoft