Boston, MA 01/29/2014 (wallstreetpr) – Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) joins the league after more than 150 companies become part of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s industry group. Facebook’s Open Compute Project endeavors to develop more efficient computer systems as more and more companies are relying on technology to store data online.
150+ members
The project, which was founded in 2011, has already gained Facebook alliance of Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NYSE:AMD) and Seagate Technology PLC (NASDAQ:STX) earlier. Yesterday, Microsoft and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) also announced that they will be joining the 150+ members’ alliance soon. With this, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), whose data centers run more than a million computers, hopes to bring down its own expenditure on equipment to a significant level. It also expects this would help its customers to take on its other online services, including Azure.
Boon or Bane?
Open compute could be really expand markets by making servers less expensive and readily customizable. This might prove critical for many companies as more and more businesses are relying on the Internet to store, analyze and even share data and information. In fact, companies like Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) have already built large data centers globally to handle the demand. But, for hardware suppliers such as Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) and Dell Inc (NASDAQ:DELL), this might not be that good a news after all.
Energy conservation
According to Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg open standards are significant for rapid development and collaboration. He said at the Open Compute conference in San Jose, California that the project has helped them save $1.2 billion. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) had benefitted a gross amount by opting to use the open standards based equipments instead of proprietary products from computer developers or other storage equipments manufacturers. Their hardware is more energy conservative and has proved its efficiency by saving an equivalent yearly energy usage of about 40,000 homes.
