OpenPOWER Foundation Names New Board Leadership to Propel POWER Architecture

John Zannos of Canonical elected Chair; Calista Redmond of IBM elected President

PISCATAWAY, NJ, Jan. 5, 2016 – The OpenPOWER Foundation today announced the election of John Zannos, Canonical, Chair, and Calista Redmond, IBM, President of the OpenPOWER Foundation Board of Directors, effective January 1, 2016. Zannos and Redmond bring deep knowledge of the open technology development community and intimate familiarity with the Foundation’s core mission, with both playing key roles within the Foundation since 2014. The new leadership will continue to guide the proliferation of OpenPOWER-based technology solutions built on IBM’s POWER architecture in today’s datacenters.

Former Chair, Gordon MacKean of Google, and President, Brad McCredie of IBM, will remain close advisors to the OpenPOWER Foundation, serving as non-voting Board Advisors to provide technical and strategic roadmap guidance as appropriate.

Driving OpenPOWER Momentum and Vision With newly elected officers from Canonical, a leader in enabling and growing open source software applications, and IBM, founding member and provider of the hardware cornerstone of the Foundation, OpenPOWER will continue under a dual leadership model. John and Calista’s combined areas of expertise will enable the Foundation to continue toward their end-to-end strategic vision, promoting engagement across the entire Board, Technical Steering Committee and membership as a whole.

John Zannos has served as a Director on the OpenPOWER Foundation Board since 2014 while also serving as Vice President of Worldwide Alliances, Business Development and Cloud Platforms at Canonical. He has a rich history of supporting open and collaborative communities, having served on the Boards of the OpenStack, OPNFV and other open source foundations. His interests are to ensure an open and thriving technology ecosystem that drives innovation and collaboration. During his career John has lead business and technology efforts around cloud and computing platforms at HP, Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, ARCO and the US EPA.

Calista Redmond has served as both a delegate on the OpenPOWER Foundation Board and Director for OpenPOWER Global Alliances at IBM since 2014. During that time, she has been deeply engrained in the Foundation, driving OpenPOWER growth, building strategic relationships with members and cultivating new ecosystem opportunities across the OpenPOWER community. Prior to her work with OpenPOWER, Redmond helped form the OpenDaylight Platform and has engaged with the Linux Foundation and Open Compute Project on various initiatives.

“Over the last two years, the OpenPOWER Foundation and our 175 members have created an ecosystem that thrives on innovation. Working together on POWER’s open architecture has enabled us to customize across the stack and create new solutions that wouldn’t be possible without this level of cross-industry collaboration,” said Gordon MacKean, former Chair of and current Advisor to the Board, OpenPOWER Foundation, and current Senior Director, Hardware Platforms, Google. MacKean welcomed the new leadership stating, “With a strong passion and commitment to open technology, our new leaders will continue to guide the Foundation’s underlying mission, bringing the industry to foster collaboration and develop advanced technology solutions that solve the evolving needs of today’s datacenter customers.”

A History of Success During the OpenPOWER Foundation’s first two years, MacKean and McCredie played instrumental roles in forming the essential building blocks of the organization, growing the Foundation from five founding members to more than 170 members in more than 22 countries. Under their guidance, these members have worked collaboratively on hundreds of innovations and brought more than 25 solutions to market, including several from members TYAN, Suzhou PowerCore, IBM, Canonical, Redis Labs, Nallatech, Convey and Alpha-Data.

Additionally, Foundation members have formed 11 Work Groups, including an Accelerator Work Group, which has taken IBM’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) technology and published an open specification so members can enable system designers and programmers to leverage CAPI on POWER.

“The OpenPOWER Foundation has moved from rethinking the datacenter to revolutionizing it, embracing openness across both hardware and software,” said OpenPOWER Foundation Chair, John Zannos. “As the OpenPOWER Foundation enters its third year and next phase of evolution, we will continue to expand the ecosystem of hardware and software providers committed to openness and innovation on the POWER platform. There is enormous need and potential to change the datacenter and deliver unprecedented choice and value to the industry, and I look forward to helping drive this change in the coming year.”

Momentum Continues with 2016 OpenPOWER Summit The OpenPOWER Foundation will host its 2016 OpenPOWER Summit: Revolutionizing the Datacenter at the San Jose Convention Center April 5-7. Open to the public, the event will feature keynote presentations from technology industry leaders, member presentations and an exhibitor pavilion. To register, exhibit, present or learn more, visit https://openpowerfoundation.org/openpower-summit-2016/.

About OpenPOWER Foundation The OpenPOWER Foundation is a global, open development membership organization formed to facilitate and inspire collaborative innovation on the POWER architecture. OpenPOWER members share expertise, investment and server-class intellectual property to develop solutions that serve the evolving needs of technology customers.

The OpenPOWER Foundation enables members to customize POWER CPU processors, system platforms, firmware and middleware software for optimization for their business and organizational needs. Member innovations delivered and under development include custom systems for large scale data centers, workload acceleration through GPU, FPGA or advanced I/O, and platform optimization for software appliances, or advanced hardware technology exploitation.

For further details visit www.openpowerfoundation.org.

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