Open Ecosystem Strategies: Catalyzing Change in Industries— with Steve Helvie and Archna Haylock

Podcast Notes

Creating Ecosystems around open source standards and the Commons is a challenging task that has been taken strategically by many of the dominating brands of our times — such as Google with Android.

For this reason, we wanted to feature one iconic project on the podcast that we often use as a yardstick when debating opportunities to develop truly open ecosystem strategies: the Open Compute Project Foundation, initiated by Facebook in 2011.

Details on what OCP is and does will be shared directly during the podcast by our guests: Steve Helvie, VP of Channel, and Archna Haylock, Community Director at OCP.

In his role, Steve helps to educate organizations on the benefits of open source hardware designs and the value of “community-driven” engineering for the data center. Archna, on the other hand, is responsible for the global community, and involved directly in its governance processes.

In this inspiring conversation — we touch upon the topics of innovation, collaboration and industry change — and our two guests show how openness can provide solutions to an increasing set of global challenges. We explore what’s needed for organizations to collaborate in an open source way, how to view competitors in the ecosystem, and how the definition of a data centre has changed through emerging needs for circularity and sustainability.

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our Medium publication:

To find out more about Archna’s and Steve’s work:

• Archna’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/archnahaylock
• Archna’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArchnaOCP
• Steve’s LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/steve-helvie-37935712
• Steve’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/stevehelvie
• Website: https://www.opencompute.org/

Other references and mentions:

• Boundaryless Whitepaper, New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking — Designing Products and Organizations for a changing world, 2020: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/DOWNLOAD-NF
• Building Complex Organizations through Simple Constraints: Zappos — with John Bunch: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/building-complex-organizations-through-simple-constraints-zappos-with-john-bunch-a2aaa916663e
• Open Networking Foundation: https://opennetworking.org/
• Telecom Infra Project (TIP): https://telecominfraproject.com/
• The Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/
• IEEE: https://www.ieee.org/
• Mozilla, Open Source Archetypes: A framework For

Purposeful Open Source, 2018: https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/MZOTS_OS_Archetypes_report_ext_scr.pdf

• GAIA-X: https://data-infrastructure.eu/
• OpenUK: https://openuk.uk/
• Future of Sustainable Data Alliance: https://futureofsustainabledata.com/
• OCP Future Technologies Symposium: https://www.opencompute.org/summit/ocp-future-technologies-symposium
• Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 7 April 2021.

Key Insights

Innovation and projects that become active in the OCP community are always underpinned by four tenets: efficiency, openness, impact, and scale. Over time, they have moved from being largely hardware-centric — specifically focussing on the data center at the beginning — to providing solutions embedding both hardware, software, and firmware. As Archna put it: “We are now looking at solutions, we are now going beyond the data center, and as the data center kind of migrates outside, to modular data centers, to the Edge, most recently, to the retail, to the FinTech environment, we’re starting to see the definition of a data center change. And so those applications are now starting to come into OCP”. And everything they do is held up by the four tenets. Each project has a charter that they go by, and the four tenets and the charter is really what helps OCP navigate and move things forward.

•  Listen to Archna and Steve talk about the four tenets from min 4:13

2. “The progression from open source software to open source hardware is a natural fit”, as Steve points out in the episode. But this idea is not always straightforward, especially for hardware vendors, many of whom are reluctant to give up IP. The potential benefits of open sourcing are many: on the customer side, you can mitigate your supply chain risk by having multiple sources of supply for the same design, while being able to directly influence the road map of the product. On the vendors’ side, you get early access to customer requirements: OCP is moving faster than normal product cycles exactly because of this. But there is a deeper reflection to make as well, around “what is our main differentiator?” If it’s not the hardware design, you need to let it go, develop in the open, and try to create this ecosystem of other players that can speed up the development, without owning your piece of the industry. Then, your focus will focus on services and other innovations on top.

•  Listen to the reflections Steve and Archna share around open source at min 13:22

3. OCP really provides not only a community for open source hardware, but also provides an interesting model for industry change. It shows how truly open ecosystem strategies can act as an amplifier of the speed of innovation in the ecosystem. As Simone captures in the episode: “When a new innovation comes up, it comes up already in open source, which is such a powerful idea: that something very new is already in the commons”. By letting community members “run freely” while sticking to the mission of OCP, they are using their creativity to innovate and find new solutions, while also connecting around things that may not have anything to do with OCP, developing other lines of business. This “progressive decentralization” could happen because of the strong foundations and the trust that Facebook placed in the project and its leadership, allowing the project to evolve flexibly. And while they could step back from governance and ownership, they remain one of the most active members in the community.

•  Listen to how Steve and Archna think this model could apply to other industries around min 38:54.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.