Lawrence Hecht, Angela Stringfellow, Liam Daley and 26 more joined Innovation Insights

Todd Greene's blog post was featuredThe Next Generation of IoTEveryone is talking up IoT as the next mega trend. Analysts are predicting that IoT will be a multi-trillion dollar category, and thousands of companies, from GE to Evernote, are redefining themselves as IoT companies. Gartner’s 2014 "Hype Cycle" has "IoT" placed neatly at the zenith of the "Peak of Inflated Expectations." Companies across the technology spectrum are rushing to build compelling products and claim their IoT stake - cashing in on the gold rush of IoT product development.The big problem is a lack of a well-understood tech stack- the layers of components or services that are used to provide software for the Internet of Things. This means that IoT developers are building top-to-bottom proprietary systems, with custom software, hardware, and communication layers. Until an IoT tech stack is codified and adopted, IoT will be hobbled by security issues, time to market challenges, and stability and reliability problems.IoT Generation I - The Custom StackThe current state of IoT development is heavily risk-prone. Designs often work well "in the lab", but fail at a high rate when deployed in the wild. Intermittent Internet connectivity, firewalls, proxies, spotty cellular connects, and other "real-world" bumps hamper success. Some of the biggest challenges include:Security Holes: The IoT raises a myriad of security concerns. Expecting each IoT development team to engineer best-practice security into each custom stack is leading to well-publicized IoT security breaches (security cameras, wireless routers, and more.)Failure Detection & Remote Updates: Most custom stacks don’t easily detect remote failures, nor do they provide a mechanism for updating devices remotely. Expecting manual processes for updating IoT device firmware at scale virtually guarantees disaster.Cost and Time-to-Market: Custom stack development costs more, makes delivery dates unpredictable, and increases overall project risk.Product Silos: Bespoke communication means no interoperability between disparate devices. This concern will expand as more IoT products are released; enterprises and consumers both will expect their devices to work together across vendors.Brittle and Bug-Prone: Bespoke IoT stacks are hard to upgrade, and failure-prone. The detailed knowledge of the custom stack is lost as the SI project ends, or as the IoT team disbands to move to other projects.IoT Generation II - An IoT Stack EmergesThe good news is that IoT products are maturing, and with them, we’re seeing a stack starting to emerge. Driving this change are three trends. First, fast-growing IoT categories like Smart Home (Nest, Insteon, Dropcam, etc.) and Connected Car (Uber, Lyft, GetTaxi, Delphi, Moj.io, etc) are seeing stiff competition. Budgets and time-to-market are becoming key drivers, and vendors can’t afford to design and build everything from scratch.Second, the growing availability of affordable hardware components and easy funding (Kickstarter, etc.) are driving grass-roots product development from teams that are unlikely to use large SI firms to build their products. To drive products to market, these bootstrapped companies are pioneering repeatable patterns of development and helping blaze the trail to a codified IoT stack.Third, consumer IoT rollouts require massive scalable and geographically distributed backend systems that are complex to build and maintain. Customer support for consumer IoT also becomes a key driver: the products must be easy to setup, reliable, and remotely upgradable. "Bricking" consumer devices via a global remote update is the deepest fear of every consumer IoT vendor. The PR fallout from a security breach can be unrecoverable. Consumer IoT vendors want a vetted IoT stack that can mitigate these risks.Evolving Components of the IoT StackMost of the IoT Stack innovation is occurring within the communication layers. While hardware design and server-side "big-data" technologies are relatively mature, the new risks in IoT are almost always connectivity based. These can be described in three categories:Local Area Communication - There’s no shortage of protocols for local device-to-device communication. Some of these include Zigbee, Insteon, Z-Wave and 6LoWPAN, all vying to deliver reliable local connectivity between devices. However, protocols are just the map. The actual journey requires frameworks and libraries that implement these products. These are emerging in both open source and commercial varieties and in various stages of development.Internet Communication - Internet connectivity holds the promise to real-time awareness and control of devices from anywhere in the world. But reliable and secure Internet connectivity is fraught with difficulty, since the challenges exist both on the device and the server-side. Devices that "listen" for commands on unprotected Internet IP addresses are guaranteed to be hacked. Server infrastructures must gracefully handle secure signaling to/from devices at massive scale over unreliable connections. Frameworks and libraries built around newer protocols like MQTT, CoAP, and WebSockets are emerging, but don’t address the costs and complexity of vendors operating these infrastructures at scale. Addressing this challenge is the adoption of Data Stream Networks, which are similar to CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) in their global reach but designed specifically for secure communication for the IoT.Vertical Industry Standards - Interoperability requires standards. Already in Smart Home, we’re seeing announcements of standards from Google, Apple, and others. In consumer electronics, a multi-vendor initiative called the AllSeen Alliance promises eventual cross-vendor compatibility. These standards will battle it out for years, and take time to mature (remember how long after Bluetooth was announced before we could pair our phones to our cars?) Upcoming IoT product releases won’t wait for these standards, but over time and with patience, these standards will eventually succeed.Todd Greene is the Founder and CEO of PubNub.See More

Rees Johnson's blog post was featuredSeeing Through the Clouds: Security Tools Provide Visibility Into Apps on Your NetworkCloud-based applications are in use all around your company, whether you approve or not. Employees are feeling bolder and less constrained by IT after years of easy access to applications at home and successful campaigns to bring their own devices to work. They are now bringing their own applications to work, creating a shadow IT layer that stretches across your company and beyond. Over 80% of respondents in a recent Frost & Sullivan survey admit to using unauthorized applications, and there are hundreds or thousands of them in use throughout your network. Most people are using at least five apps, whether it is one of many file sharing tools (the most popular category), online meeting and collaboration, travel and expense management, webmail, slide sharing, or document review and editing, to name just a few.The good news is that the majority of these tools are making your employees’ jobs easier, increasing mobility and flexibility, or facilitating communication and collaboration with each other and with customers and partners. The bad news is that files and data are sliding past your security policies, with insufficient monitoring and control. You may not want to shut them off, because they are making your company more productive, but you definitely need visibility to know what is being used, and some controls over who and what go where.Everybody Is Doing ItIf you start asking people why they use an application that they know are not sanctioned, they will likely tell you that it better fits their requirements than the IT-approved option (if there is one), that they are taking the risks into consideration, and that everyone is doing it. In fact, members of your IT staff are more likely to be using non-approved apps than anyone else.When you delve a little further, you will find out that the root cause of this sense of application entitlement is probably very slow IT approval of new apps mixed with unclear policies and poor communication about the security and privacy risks. While your security staff is running regular webinars on secure passwords and data protection, employees likely think that the security features offered by these cloud apps, combined with their judgment, will satisfy corporate policies. Unfortunately, that is often not the case.Data Is Leaking Out All OverYou've seen it happen to celebrities. Something of value is stored in the cloud, intentionally or accidentally, and someone with malicious intent wants access to it. It's happening to your data as well, although in smaller quantities. Not yet a flood, but still a significant leak. It could be compromised credentials, leaking a corporate user ID and password. It could be accidental distribution of files or data. It could be unauthorized access, internal or external. Whatever the leak, the result is data loss or theft, negative impact to corporate reputation, malware infiltration, or loss of service to the cloud.Reviewing a number of popular cloud file services and applications, Frost & Sullivan found that around twenty percent of users have experienced a security incident, with unauthorized access, sensitive data leaks, or data theft the most likely.Step 1: Improve visibility. You cannot control what you cannot see, so the first step in gaining control of cloud applications is discovering and monitoring usage. Your web gateway is perfectly placed to help, and is probably already logging the activity, or at least has the capability. In fact, some security startups are building point products that use these logs to provide information and constraints on hundreds or thousands of applications. However, it is probably faster, easier, and less expensive to just use the gateway's own features.Using detailed log reports, you can see all of the web activity that is crossing the borders of your network, and break it down by application name, amount of traffic, even who is using which apps. Find all the varied uses of DropBox, Box, Google Drive, Google Apps, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Office 365, Apple iCloud, Skype, Survey Monkey, among a long list of apps. You will probably be very surprised by the number and variety of applications, and your estimate of how many there are is likely off by a factor of five to ten.Step 2: Assess risk. Armed with a detailed activity report, organizations will want to develop a general usage policy. With available data broken out by department, user, or even by type of data, web usage policies can be enabled to obtain the level of control required to meet your initiatives and compliance objectives. You may find that most of the web apps being used are fairly harmless, and are even helping your organization with innovative tools in advance of broader adoption. Further review, based on your industry, markets, regulations, and data policies, will refine your risk tolerance so that you can take the necessary steps to protect your organization and employees.Step 3: Establish control. Now that you know what the risk levels are, you will probably want some controls over who and what go where. The first step is to block the nasty, high-risk applications and domains at the gateway, the ones that no one should be using. The second step is to permit the innocuous, minimal risk applications, and there are probably hundreds of these. This leaves a smaller set of applications that are beneficial, but come with some risk.The third step is a big one, applying some constraints on some applications for some users. For example, everyone can use Facebook, but no game playing is allowed and only the marketing and social media team can post. Or employees can use cloud-based file sharing and collaboration tools, as long as data loss prevention safeguards are in place to ensure that those involved are authorized to use the files being shared.Encryption is an option if you decide to permit a particular app, but want a tighter grip on data that is stored there. Encrypting selected data keeps the keys in the hands of the business, and any extra encryption added by the app company is a bonus. In combination with digital loss prevention tools, you decide what data is ok for cloud apps, what is ok if it is encrypted, and what data cannot be uploaded at all.Policies, Rules, Monitoring. Repeat as NeededLike almost all security and privacy issues, securing cloud applications starts with the appropriate policies. Using information from the web gateway logs, along with your existing privacy and security policies, create a broad policy about what types of employees are allowed to use what types of applications with what data. Try not to be too specific, as new cloud apps are constantly being developed and existing ones rapidly evolving. Next, build the rules to enforce those policies. Then setup ongoing monitoring and logging to measure the effectiveness of the rules and to catch new or unanticipated behaviors.When some new cloud tool comes along, as you know it will, review and repeat as necessary. The clouds are big and growing, but your security tools can see through them.Rees Johnson is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Content Security Business Unit at Intel Security.See More

TweetThank you to everyone who participated in the Now You’re Thinking! campaign to donate books to military families via Pearson Foundation and We Give Books: http://wegivebooks.org. We are proud to announce that thanks to your help, we have donated nearly 12,000 books to three phenomenal charities that benefit military families: The Mission Continues, Pat Tillman Foundation, and United Through Reading. For each of the children’s books you read online, we donated one hardcover or paperback book to one of these charities.  Whether you read one book or 1,000 books for the campaign, we are eternally grateful.  You made a difference! Thanks to your support, United Through Reading will be able to provide more options for soldiers who want to videotape themselves reading a book to send to their children back home.  The Pat Tillman Foundation will donate the books to community centers and libraries near military bases, and The Mission Continues will use the books to rehabilitate a community center or library through one of their amazing service projects. As we’ve noted before, reading to your children consistently at a young age creates a foundation for future critical thinking skills.  Each book you read online for the Now You’re Thinking! campaign will help support children’s literacy and critical thinking ability.  Thank you so much for your support!  

Ian Berman posted a blog postIf A Picture Is Worth A 1000 Words Then Streaming Video Must Be Worth 1.2 MillionA new app came flying out of SxSW this year called Meerkat and instantly we saw a potential game changer for the travel industry. Not sure what Meerkat is? Well, if you’re still sifting through the buzz from SxSW, Meerkat is a free app that allows you to record video from your smartphone and stream it instantly on Twitter for your followers to watch. It allows people to tell any story they want or to share any experience they want, in real-time.For travelers, Meerkat could mean live broadcasting of you making it to the top of the Great Wall of China or trying squid for the first time in a foreign land. In this age of sharing, it’s going to be fun, and everyone is going to get very creative.Meerkat could change the way we use Twitter. It isn’t inconceivable that those traditional 140-character tweets will gradually be replaced by live streaming and other videos. It is likely that long, well-produced videos will give way to serendipitous, funny "sharing" videos.As with every social platform, big businesses will start to evaluate how they can use a tool like Meerkat to connect with potential customers. We’ve seen brands crack the Twitter code and slowly find creative uses for Snapchat and Instagram. Meerkat has the potential to be next.For instance, if you are following Virgin Atlantic online you could see in real time what their new planes look like. Perhaps we’ll start to see some humorous promotional videos from companies like Avis. Maybe a hotel chain like EVEN Hotels will use Meerkat to give us a tour of what a wellness hotel provides. Through Meerkat, brands can partner with famous travel influencers - whether that’s Anthony Bourdain or Samantha Brown - by allowing people to live vicariously through them. Whatever the creative use is, Meerkat has the potential to connect brands with their customers and make them feel like they are part of the experience, unlike other social networking platforms where people often feel like they are watching from the outside looking in.In the world of selfies and information overload, people are continuing to seek out better, more authentic ways to connect. At WorldMate, we believe that connecting is also a key to our success. One example is WorldMate enabling our customers to connect spontaneously through LinkedIn, giving business travelers the vantage point to see which of their colleagues are nearby.We’re excited to see if the travel industry will adopt and use an app like Meerkat and we’re dreaming up potential ways we can add such advances to our products... stay tuned!Ian Berman is Vice President of Business Development for WorldMate. See More

Sinclair Schuller's blog post was featuredHow Enterprise PaaS Can Add Critical Value to MicroservicesWhen building loosely coupled cloud apps, microservices are today’s preferred pattern. James Lewis and Martin Fowler wrote the seminal introduction, and the concept has been disseminated widely since. While Lewis and Fowler’s entire post is a fantastic read, one specific requirement stands out: microservices must favor "smart endpoints and dumb pipes."Essentially, the smarts should be in the app components, and the communication between those components must be as simple as possible. Without that requirement, architectures will bloat and become monolithic. When asked, "How does your PaaS support microservices?" most enterprise PaaS vendors offer little more than deployment agility. While agility is an important piece of the puzzle, application bootstrap policies directly support both the smart-endpoints / dumb-pipes vision and the implementation of microservices.With smart pipes, the danger of increased complexity is high. Smart pipes often lead to a monolithic architecture. Lewis and Fowler, in a sidebar to their write-up, state that they have seen "many botched implementations of service orientation" including the tendency to hide complexity away in enterprise service buses (ESBs).Why Is That Bad? Smart pipes create an unintended tight coupling between endpoints and the pipes themselves. That is, an application becomes dependent on expectations in the communications protocols for proper function, and the general systems behavior is now defined in the pipes. A system leveraging a smart ESB ends up more often than not functionally dependent on that ESB (carrying around an ESB is quite the dependency!). As soon as pipes start to become too smart, they force monolithic creep. What’s worse is that endpoints may become co-dependent through the smart pipe with each expecting an implicit finessing of RPC and payloads to work properly.Unfortunately, the temptation to make pipes smarter is high. In the names of abstraction, architecture standardization, and re-usability, adding logic to communication pathways between services is commonplace. What starts as a microservices architecture quickly bloats to a monolithic architecture. However, a system does need a common, orthogonal offering to keep redundant functionality low.Does it make sense to embed authentication logic into every endpoint or to script monitoring hooks into a web service or to write code for any other non-business function in a microservice? It does, if it’s the only way to keep "endpoints smart and pipes dumb."Fortunately, It's Not the Only OptionPrevious generations of developers introduced techniques like aspect-oriented programming to deal with the issue of separating cross-cutting concerns from application logic for better code modularity. Interestingly, similar techniques can be leveraged in cloud-computing and PaaS-based microservices. Jon Norton, a software engineer, explains an interesting feature called "application bootstrap policies" that allows IT operators to instrument libraries and modify any guest application.Interested in mixing APM into an app deployment? Write a bootstrap policy. Want to modify the IL or Java bytecode of any guest app to introduce some fancy byte-level instrumentation? Write a bootstrap policy.Bootstrap policies are a modular vehicle for mixing cross-cutting concerns into endpoints on a PaaS. The power in this is huge and should not be underestimated. Endpoints can be smart while pipes remain dumb. Most importantly, bootstrap policies support a core commitment that all developers avoid writing unnecessary code.Sinclair Schuller is an enterprise computing expert and CEO of Apprenda.See More

Mike Arney's blog post was featuredManaging Your Health? There May Not Be an App for ThatMany companies in, or looking to get into, the consumer health sector are realizing they need to revise their offerings — products, services, and business models — to better connect with their target consumer, and with people in general.  The prevailing logic is that "connecting" means designing in a way that promotes long term use and leaves the consumer feeling successful, happy, motivated, and unencumbered by their product choices—not disappointed and burdened.Leaving users emotionally fulfilled is a core success metric in product experience design, but the consumer health space adds another layer of complexity. There are so many definitions and types of health.  It's fair to say that everyone is looking to get healthier, but understanding key differences in what "healthy" means to consumers is critical to designing product experiences that they will value.There are three main categories of consumer health products, and they're purchased for different reasons. Understanding them is the first step to understanding how consumers define what "healthy" looks like.SustainThe first reason is consumers seek out products to help them sustain their health. It's important to observe that health products that sustain are not all wearables. Some may be worn on the body, but they are not connected to technology, or part of the IoT ecosystem.Sustaining solutions are designed to address functional health issues that require constant attention just to normalize a user's condition—these are products such as diabetes monitors, contact lenses, ingestible vitamins, hearing aids, and prosthetics. These are products the body depends on to function, and are employed for the long term. One of their most important emotional jobs is to not stigmatize the user, to not call attention to conditions most do not want to promote. These users feel compromised, and don't want to be defined as such.  EvolveSometimes, consumers make a choice to purchase products that will help them improve their lives, embodying a wish for a better, easier, or more intuitive life. These products are purchased with the aim of helping their users evolve. Think of evolving as an action toward getting users healthier, or simply staying healthy.The lifespan of these products is shorter term; think of trackers for fitness, sleep, and your mood. (One might argue the first wearable to help someone understand their emotional and physical state was analog—the mood ring.) But here, we are talking about wearables—internet-enabled products that gather data that will ostensibly help us get better at some aspect of our health and wellbeing. This goal is emotional— a new understanding of our bodies, along with a new ability to independently improve one's health.These devices offer up reports and data, empowering users to make decisions to change their behavior in new ways. And here, companies find challenges with adherence—we've all heard the story by now that most wearables get abandoned after a six-month run. In this short time, though, consumer health trackers offer value: they train consumers to hone their intuition about what healthy looks and feels like. I took 10,000 steps today, or I slept 8 hours consistently over the past week are both productive insights that can help a user modify behavior toward a goal of self-improvement.Where the sustain modality addresses functional deficiency, products assisting us toward the evolution of our intuition are more aspirational, and not so much required. The benefit a current fitness tracker provides may not outweigh the experience inconveniences of wearing it, charging it, not breaking it, etc.AmplifyProducts that amplify offer a category of health and wellness devices that assist consumers who want to better and promote themselves. These buyers are making a choice to enhance their physical and cognitive capabilities. They are looking to get ahead and augment basic life functions and activities—and the products to serve them need to communicate and support their specific areas of focus and interest.  They can be worn like a badge. This consumer need creates challenges for companies that have products and technologies that amplify but don’t really understand how people with use them.  Products like Google Glass suffered from precisely this problem; without a clear purpose consumers were left to define their own, and the people around them were left to guess why others were wearing these prominent techy Goggles. While third party partnerships (Ray Ban and Luxxotica, in the case of Glass) and outside companies (i.e. Lóreal, who made use of Glass by training their stylists to record professional makeup applications in high-end department stores) have found use and meaning in amplification devices such as Glass, few manufacturers alone have risen to the challenge.A successful amplification product experience offers a clear purpose, like Recon Jet’s application of Glass-like technology, which enables cyclists to hone their talent. Recon understands that their product's job is to help users achieve a singular, niche goal: to become a high-performing bike rider. Owners of this wearable technology are proud to seen as honing their craft as riders, thus destigmatizing any social awkwardness around wearing the headset. Things get interesting when products whose primary function is to sustain make the leap to amplification; the New York Times recently lauded a children's prosthetics maker for elevating their man-made fingers to superhero status. Athletes who can compete faster at sports with artificial limbs reap the benefit of sustaining a long-term condition and amplifying their physical fitness. Products that transcend the sustaining functionality can inspire consumer health and medical companies to design for overt appearance.Products to help users sustain healthy states win when they can become connected tools which amplify—adding additional, unexpected emotional value.For businesses designing products in the consumer health space, the first step is to understand the type of health that they are designing for, and have a true understanding of those consumers' physical and emotional needs. Once you truly understand what health means to consumers, you can design products to do the job they were purchased to do. Mike Arney is a Principal at the design and innovation consultancy Continuum.See More

TweetFor years, educators have struggled with how to help students with dyslexia learn to read at the same pace as their classmates.  Dyslexia is a type of learning disability that affects the way letters are visually perceived.  Letters such as "m" and "n" are easily confused, while other letters are flipped horizontally or vertically by the brain. As a result, individuals with dyslexia struggle to distinguish letters and words as quickly as individuals without the learning disability.  Dyslexia affects as much as 5-10% of the world population, and educators have learned to modify their teaching style to help their students. However, Christian Boer may have revolutionized the world for people struggling with dyslexia.  He has created a new font that makes small adjustments to each letter that helps illuminate the differences between similar letters. Watch the video below to learn more about the new font "Dyslexie": What problems are you trying to solve today?  

Whitney Fishman's blog post was featuredTechnology Marries CreativityThe term digital marketing was first used in the 1990s in reference to the marketing and advertising of electronic devices, take for example, computers. In 2014 we evolved digital marketing’s meaning, leveraging a slew of different technologies and platforms to target consumers in ways never before imaginable. This second age of digital advertising provides new creative canvases and interactivity opportunities for marketers.Now in 2015, as these technologies evolve, marketers can tap into new streams of data and never-before-possible opportunities for campaign creativity and relevancy. Today, data not only helps dictate and define the stories that connect with audiences emotionally and culturally, but also helps to shape the cadence and narrative sequencing the stories. This increased intelligence has the potential to help deliver creative experiences that are more contextual, timely and impactful than ever before.A great example of this in action is ephemeral messaging app Snapchat, which documented 2014’s final and 2015’s first moments in a way that became an international viewing experience. Select curators shared photos and videos from Snapchat users celebrating New Years around the world, resulting in a short-lived documentary in the Snapchat app of the international New Year’s Eve experience. Snapchat also shared the New Year’s Eve story on video screens throughout Times Square, the first time Snapchat shared its content on another medium.While messaging apps like Snapchat are still in the infant stages of testing and offering brands advertising opportunities that reflect the way consumers use messaging apps, focusing on leveraging these types of platforms as tools to tell more dynamic, intimate stories is a great start towards proving their utility within the content-based marketing universe.These tools and technologies are allowing marketers to be more thoughtful and creative in their targeting approaches as well as with the ads served. Yet marketers should still approach this space with caution; doing anything for the sake of jumping on a trend, whether it’s using a messaging app or a different emerging platform, jumping headfirst into data without understanding how, why or when to use it, or simply buying into a technology for its cool factor or press headlines, defeats the power and opportunities these tools provide.With this continued technological evolution, we will continue to uncover new data streams and new ways to analyze those data points to ensure we target our audiences at the right time, on the proper device, and with relevant content. This actionable intelligence will continue to shape the way marketers create and disseminate content this year.Whitney Fishman is senior director of innovation and consumer technology at MEC North America.See More

Bradley McCredie's blog post was featured10 Ways the World’s First Open Server Architecture Is DisruptiveMoore’s Law, which holds that processor advancement is derived from transistor scaling, is commonly believed to be dying as semiconductor design bumps up against the limits of physics. It’s debatable whether this is indeed true, but one thing is certain: Major computing shifts such as big data and cloud are placing heavy new demands on computing systems, and the tech industry’s traditional "tick tock" approach of moving to a new chip technology every couple of years is failing to keep up. What’s needed is a new wave of post-silicon innovation to scale the servers in data centers so they can handle today’s unprecedented workloads. That’s much of the rationale for the creation of the OpenPOWER Foundation, a technology movement started by Google, IBM, NVIDIA, Mellanox and Tyan in 2013 and now backed by 111 companies and other organizations in 22 countries. Members gathered in San Jose this week for the first OpenPOWER Summit and unveiled 10 hardware advances that demonstrate OpenPOWER’s impact as a breeding ground for new technology, These include the first commercially available OpenPOWER server, the world’s first custom POWER chip and a new high-performance server initiating a roadmap that will culminate in the worlds most powerful systems to be delivered to the U.S. government. It’s time to move beyond processor-centric design to a new paradigm that takes into account software, post-silicon materials and most importantly, the benefits of an open, collaborative ecosystem. No one company alone can tackle the new types of systems the world will need for the growing number of hyper-scale data centers. That's why  the OpenPOWER initiative makes IBM’s POWER hardware and software available to open development and allows POWER intellectual property to be licensed to others. Here’s a Top 10 List of ways OpenPOWER is disrupting the data center: 1. As the Linux revolution has vividly shown in software, open, collaborative development is the key to rapid, continuous innovation. OpenPOWER brings that same principle to servers. In fact, it’s the world’s first and only open server architecture. 2. Open ecosystems and technology are secure: Everyone can see the source code. 3. OpenPOWER technology can form the basis for indigenous transformation. For example, through technology building blocks made available by the OpenPOWER Foundation via the China POWER Technology Alliance, China is now equipped with the tools to build a secure technology ecosystem from the ground up by China, for China. 4. OpenPower enables customization. The explosion of big data requires systems to be built around data-intensive workloads. OpenPOWER is creating an opportunity for organizations to customize systems to fit these specific needs. 5. Companies like the safety of buying open technology becuase it guarantees a continuity of supply and options. 6. The OpenPOWER architecture is fully open, with no control points on design. 7. The opportunity in OpenPOWER is a function of an organization’s skill, not access to technology and provides an  ability to build new solutions on the open platform. 8. OpenPOWER technology includes some technology breakthroughs such as IBM's Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), a unique interface feature that allows partners to build their solutions right on top of the POWER8 chip, without latency issues. 9. OpenPOWER technology provides access to a broad range of customers, from enterprise data centers to warehouse scale data centers. 10. OpenPOWER provides a forum for collaboration with a wide variety of partners and results in new forms of differentiation. Given the need for speed in a rapidly changing industry, I predict it won’t be long before collaboration through open ecosystems is the only route to innovation for any type of enterprise technology. Bradley McCredie is an IBM Fellow, vice president of IBM Power Systems Development and president of the OpenPOWER Foundation. See More