Los Angeles, Calif. — Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source at SUSE, and chairman of the OpenStack Foundation’s board of directors, delivered a keynote presentation titled “Lightning Talk: Human Enablement” at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America this week.
Clark began by noting how the open source movement has exploded over the years with artificial intelligence, digital currency, distributed signatures, the internet of things (IoT), everything-as-a-service and the cloud. Consequently, many people are wondering if there is any sort of commonality behind all of this, and more importantly, where is technology going?
The thread that ties these innovations together, according to Clark, is “empowering humans with technology for any place, anytime.” To crystallize the idea, Clark drew reference to how automobiles are beginning to outperform people in certain respects.
“The previous car I bought had all kinds of sensors, which would beep at me and tell me that I’m going to fast or swaying out of my lane. Nowadays with the latest purchase, the car doesn’t just beep at me; it actually corrects for me and takes over and tells me if I am being stupid, and that it can do a better job,” he said. “So we are enabling humans with technology, and in some cases, we are enabling them with such technology that it can actually do a better job than we can.”
Clark proceeded by explaining how consumer expectations have changed alongside technology. Consumers used to expect to be able to draw money from a checking account a week following deposit. Now, constumers expect to be able to draw money from a checking account immediately after making a deposit.
Currently, customers want instant services and solutions, on-demand mobile access, security and reliability. These expectations are putting pressure on businesses providing a service, which is putting even more pressure on those developing those services. “Businesses have to dedicate themselves, differentiate themselves with speed, time to market, fast responses, “Clark said. “They got to be very agile and they got to be able to lead the competition.”
IT transformation is needed to meet these business requirements, which Clark says USES is helping to empower. He noted how SUSE recently celebrated its 25th anniversary by releasing the latest version of its enterprise operating system. Rather than the amount of choices going down after 25 years, Clark said the amount of choices are actually going up with partnerships with IBM’s mainframe, Intel’s agile infrastructure and ARM’s high-performance computing.
“This is why I’m excited about the opportunities that we have today with open source because all these projects we’ve been working on for years are providing us with the technology of the future, enabling us as humans to innovate and to realize the potential that was not possible even a few years ago,” Clark concluded.
