 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Crick here with The Cube. We are on the ground at San Jose Convention Center at the very first ever Open Power Summit. It's a brand new show with a relatively new organization, the Open Power Foundation, and we're joined with one of the founders, founding members from Google, Gordon McKean, senior director from Google, but more importantly, the chairman of Open Power. So congratulations on this big event. Thank you very much, Jeff. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. Yeah, absolutely. So, let's jump into it. What is Open Power and why is the Open Power Summit important? Well, Open Power Foundation is an organization we started about a year and a half ago officially back in December of 2013. We started with only five members and we've actually grown the organization into about 113 members now. We've got a number of members from across the ecosystem that make up the hyper scale computing industry. So we've got everyone from chip providers with IBM and Sujo Power Core all the way out to the end customers like Rockspace, Google and end consumers. So it's really covering the whole space and what we set out to do was actually attack what we saw which was a growing trend that we were seeing a decrease in the performance value of servers over time. We just weren't seeing the effects of Moore's Law really having that impact on the price performance of a server. And so we thought by bringing this community together we could actually try and combat that trend by actually optimizing the system bottlenecks out. So let's back up a bit and talk about the power and Open Power is the power IBM microprocessor architecture, correct? So it actually did start with that. IBM, we needed to build this around a processor. That's right. And so we actually built this around the power architecture. IBM was good enough to, they had the foresight to actually open up their roadmap, open up the interfaces and start to actually put features into the interfaces that allowed the partner companies to actually build in tighter integration so we can eliminate those system bottlenecks. So as I was going to say, do you see Open Power Foundation as more of kind of a classic kind of open source project? Probably not because it didn't start organically or more kind of like a consortium. Like you see GE trying to put together right now around the Internet of Things. I'd say it's, I'd say it is more of a traditional open organization, but it does have a business focus. We have, we have, everyone in our group is interested in furthering their business. I think everyone in all open organizations are doing that. We've got a business we want to move forward. I think the, I think it's open in the sense that the standards are all open, the work products that people are building out of this are all being shared with the other member companies and there are no, there are no restrictions to the member companies having access to this. Yeah. So it's interesting, right? Because power has been around for a very long time, the power line of microprocessors. So why do you think, and I know you can't speak for Intel, but just from your point of view being on the group, why would they start to open up parts of that if they opened up a lot of it, a little of it? Is it really interfaces? What's the open part of, of open power? Well, from right now they've actually allowed people to start designing with the chips. So they've, the specs for designing a system around a Power 8 processor is the first thing that they opened up. So we had a reference board from Tyanne. They were able to build that. I think it's the first third-party reference system board that's come out with an IBM chip in a while and we've got, now we've got, with this show you can actually see a large number of system boards and systems that have been, that have been showcased at this show. Yeah. And you said that's new. That was not possible before. Not something you were doing before. And we've also got them opening up the interfaces. So they've developed something called CAPI, which is a high, high-performance interconnect for peripherals that actually allows the IO devices, your networking card, Melanox has their new networking card, that actually can take advantage of this high-speed interconnect and this high-performance interconnect that allows the IO card to actually participate in, highly integrated with the processor and with the processor's memory system. Right. That pesky moving of data to the core and back and forth, right? It's kind of good in and out. It never goes away. That's right. So talk a little bit about open source, right? Open source has been around a long time in software and we're seeing more and more kind of trends in hardware. Just at the Open Compute project last week, we'll be at OpenStack Summit, we'll be at Open Networking Summit and it's interesting how people are trying to apply or are applying kind of open source principles of innovation and getting the word out now to hardware. So how is that really working? In all cases, it works. What you're doing is you're bringing together a large community of people who want to see something move forward and with Open Compute and with that initiative, what you see is more parallel activities that can go forward when you've got a large membership like that. We're seeing the same thing with OpenPower. This broad cross-section, very diverse partners with very specific expertise, you can actually make a lot better progress and make a lot more progress when you've got this kind of membership. That's what the Open Community fosters. Yeah, it's amazing how the innovation that's driven from outside of your four walls in an open situation is really fantastic. So we're getting the hook. Last question, you're from Google, why is this important to Google? Google's involved in a lot of open initiatives. Any time we see something that can advance the industry, we want to be engaged with that and that's a big part of what OpenPower is about. Great. Well again, congratulations. You've been at it for a while. The Foundation's been at it for a while, but this is still the first summit, right? Yes, it is. We'll get that on the t-shirt and the bag and all the other fun stuff that comes with the show. Thank you for coming out. All right, Gary, thanks a lot. So I'm Jeff Rick. We're at the OpenPower Summit, the very first one in San Jose, California, and you're watching theCUBE.