From Facebook to Twitter and Microsoft to Apple, the technology industry is home to some of the most valuable and innovative companies in the world.
In recent years, we’ve seen new ventures transform themselves from tiny start-ups to global corporations within the space of a year or two simply by offering the world an online service or product that couldn’t be found elsewhere. This incredible success is made possible by advances in technology, so when one company creates a new product or improves an existing one, they often guard it with veracity.
This has lead to many companies and developers using services like software escrow from Iron Mountain to ensure the safe and assured transfer of software from the developer to the recipient. However, in the last few years, some of the biggest software and development companies in the world have begun actively sharing the secrets of their success; encouraging other individuals or organisations to learn from their discoveries rather than keeping these details close to their chest.
This increase in the sharing of IT data has already lead to some interesting advancements and as more and more companies join the sharing movement, the rate of innovation will only grow.
Why share data?
The positive effect of IT data sharing and collaboration can be seen clearly in the impact of the Open Compute Project: a consortium created by Facebook to share their server designs and other innovations.
Where once it was mainly Facebook sharing ideas, Microsoft has now joined the project and in so doing have pushed the advancement to another level. As Microsoft has more than a million servers across all of its data centres, any saving that they can make to energy consumption or improvement they can make to efficiency will go a long way; saving the company a lot of money in the long term.
For example, the latest designs which have been rolled out over the Microsoft network in the past year offer 40% server cost savings and improvement of 15% power efficiency. This is in addition to a whopping 50% reduction in deployment and service times.
With IT data sharing, these innovations from the minds at Microsoft can trickle down to server production worldwide and will inevitably affect the way that smaller companies and manufacturers operate; thus improving functionality, serviceability and affordability for all of us in the future.