IBM Deepens OpenPOWER partnerships 

OpenPOWER Partnerships are growing

While the announcement of new servers is nothing new and often hard to get excited about, the more interesting part of this announcement is the way IBM is working with its OpenPOWER Foundation partners. These servers are good examples of how deep that relationship currently goes.

OpenPOWER Foundation was setup by IBM as an opportunity to widen the access to IBM Power technology. IBM’s self stated plan at launch was to give all the partners full access to the POWER architecture to create, modify and build what they wanted.

It already has partners in China who have added Chinese language sets and numerical processors to the POWER8 core and those will be manufactured and installed inside IBM POWER8 systems in China. It is this level of partnership that IBM is talking about when it calls OpenPOWER an open technology foundation.

It has specific benefits for IBM as well. The image below comes from an analyst presentation that IBM made a week ago introducing these new servers. It shows where IBM is taking advantage of developments from its OpenPOWER Foundation partners rather than having to spend significant sums in R&D to develop these same components itself.

This second image, below also shows how closely the OpenPOWER Foundation partners are embedded into IBM Power Systems when it comes to monetise OpenPOWER technology.

What makes both of these images interesting is that it is clear that IBM is keen to show the OpenPOWER Foundation partners that this is more than just access to the technology. It wants them to help it speed up the deployment of Power Systems into the wider market as part of its battle against Intel, especially in the data centre and Linux space.

This represents an interesting challenge for some of these companies as they work with both IBM and Intel. At present and for the foreseeable future there is plenty of money for these partners to make off of both vendors. The question is whether IBM can turn Power System and in particular OpenPOWER into a bigger revenue earner for each of these partners than their current Intel relationships.

Conclusion

These are well positioned boxes for IBM and continue its war with Intel in the Linux big data space. It is again claiming supremacy over Intel in terms of performance and it won’t be long before we see an Intel partner release from HP, Dell, Huawei or Lenovo release refuting the IBM claims above.

IBM is being smart here in making the most of its relationship with the OpenPOWER Foundation. While there is no remit for the partners to sell back to IBM there is very little white box activity around OpenPOWER yet. As Tyan and others begin to bring more motherboards to the market and even start showing them at places such as CeBIT and COMPUTEX, that market will grow.