Publishing house Vibal Group recently brought into the country a top-level Filipino-American executive of social networking behemoth Facebook to explore the adoption of Open Compute Project (OCP) in the Philippines.
Charlie Manese, Facebook solutions engineer and vice president of channel development for the Open Compute Project, was invited by the Vibal Group to specifically discuss the possibility of institutionalizing an OCP charter in the Philippines.
The dialogue, held at the Mapua Institute of Technology in Makati City, was attended by representatives from the Philippine Society of IT Education, the ICT Office of the DOST, Philippine Normal University, HP Singapore, Intel Philippines, Huawei Philippines, and Microsoft Philippines.
“We invite you to join us in this mission to collectively develop the most efficient computing infrastructure possible,” Manese, who is based in Silicon Valley, said.
Manese said in the forum how the project began when a small team of Facebook engineers spent the past two years tackling a big challenge: how to scale its computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible.
The result was a data center infrastructure that is 38-percent more efficient and 24-percent less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers. Inspired by the model of open source software, Facebook?s idea is to share the innovations from its data center for the global IT industry to use and improve upon.
With OCP Foundation?s rapidly growing community around the world, Manese thought of including the Philippines among their member-countries. His chance encounter with Vibal Group president and CEO Gus Vibal during a summit abroad paved the way for this plan to come to fruition.
During the summit, Manese answered questions from stakeholders and urged them to discuss collectively developing the computing infrastructure in the country.
?The success of the initiative lies in the capacity of the technology players in the Philippines to build the infrastructure, commit to contribute, and deploy with confidence,? Manese noted.
According to ICT Office of the DOST, the world has been benefiting from the talent, resourcefulness, and competitiveness of the global Filipino workforce since the 1980s.
While the Philippines has a solid track record of delivering high-value software services, the forum attendees acknowledged that the country could still be lacking in capability in building efficient data centers.
Despite this challenge, Vibal Group said it sees opportunities in making the Philippines open compute-ready and eventually contribute to the development by educating the public, sponsoring universities through workshops and hackathons, and engaging other stakeholders.
?Vibal has always been oriented towards open computing. As a technology solutions company, we are committed to set up an OCP charter here in the Philippines and add our voice to the region,? said Gus Vibal.
Vibal’s technology arm, Vibe Technologies, has built its solutions around open source technologies since its incorporation in 2011.
This has led to a number of milestones in mobile software development, including an e-bookstore using an in-house DRM solution, an internally developed e-reading app that runs in multi platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, Chrome), and an integrated learning management system that can operate online or through a local server.
