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By 2020, digital transformation teams will source more than 80 percent of their solution components from open source communities. That’s according to IDC’s “Top 10 Tech Predictions For 2017.”

Open source has never been more important to the IT industry. Key reasons include:

• Open collaboration brings together diverse skills to solve common problems.
• Open source lowers barriers to innovation – anyone can share an idea, and the market will decide.
• Open software makes it easy for developers to access, develop and integrate software solutions.

But in order to deliver sustainable value, open source software needs to run on the right infrastructure. Infrastructure that delivers on what we consider to be the three key pillars of enterprise computing: security, speed and scale.

These twin themes of open source software and enterprise computing come together at the Open Source Summit.

Open Source Summit

The Linux Foundation is one of the hubs of the open source community, and their Open Source Summit events bring together innovators, developers and IT managers from around the world.

I’ve attended many of these events over the years, and each time, more people come together, sharing more new ideas and expanding their scope to cover more open source projects. What continually surprises me is how fast the open source technology moves and new ideas become mainstream.

Three of the hottest topics this year at Open Source Summit North America are expected to be cloud, blockchain and containers.

Security, speed and scale are important across each of these, prompting leaders today to ask some important questions:

• How do I ensure that private data is kept private, and protected from insider threats as well as external attacks?
• How do I deploy applications and deliver data fast, no matter how big the data or how complex the workload?
• How do I scale applications and data from start-up to enterprise scale, without needing to change the architecture?

At the IBM booth at Open Source Summit, you can check out these open technologies for yourself. We’ll be showing the IBM Blockchain Platform (based on the open source Hyperledger Fabric), Docker containers running in a secure environment and IBM open cloud technologies. You’ll be able to see inside our latest IBM LinuxONE enterprise server, and sign up for the “Unchain the Frame” hackathon or the LinuxONE Community Cloud.

During the IBM Executive Forum session on Tuesday, we’ll be diving deeper into these technologies and how they can deliver security, speed and scale. Expert speakers include CTO IBM LinuxONE Marcel Mitran  on ultra-secure cloud services, IBM Fellow Donna Dillenberger talking about blockchain, Cognition Foundry CEO Ron Argent on building differentiated value in the cloud, and Fatbrain co-founder Rajarshi Das talking about driving business outcomes with AI.

Changing the world

On Tuesday morning Barry Baker, VP of Offering Management for IBM Z and LinuxONE, will be delivering the keynote at the Open Source Summit, along with Shaun Frankson, Co-Founder of the Plastic Bank.

Plastic Bank is a great example of an organization which needs a highly secure, fast and scalable infrastructure. By incentivizing people in developing nations to recycle plastic in exchange for simple but valuable benefits such as mobile phone charging, they are helping to reduce both ocean plastic and global poverty.

Built on IBM LinuxONE and blockchain, Plastic Bank applications need to be able to scale up to support billions of transactions, while keeping private data secure and delivering great response times for millions of users.

If you’re not at Open Source Summit, you can listen into the keynote live video stream using the OSS event website.

You can learn about how open source software and IBM LinuxONE can help you change the world at www.ibm.com/linuxone.

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