INDIA HAS BECOME A GREAT SUPPORTER OF OPEN SOURCE
Open source is influencing the IT industry around the globe. Not just the software leaders but also the big hardware players of the industry are closely watching the growth of open source technologies. India is emerging as one of the top regions for open
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What were the prime challenges you faced while adopting open source at Western Digital?
A large number of companies moving to open source face the challenges of education, creating awareness and a compliance policy that strikes the right balance. We are no different, and have grown over the past three years to be an active contributor and visible supporter of open source in the community.
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How are you planning to enable open source within Western Digital?
Open source, like standards, is considered an essential and strategic part of how we innovate at Western Digital. It is connected to our technology and business strategy as a company. Going forward, we plan to continue to consume and contribute to key projects, speak to and sponsor developers and be a part of projects and communities that we work in. We will also collaborate with other companies and projects to develop areas that are important to the industry and to us. Certainly, you will see us being more visible in our support for open source innovation.
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Has it become vital for an IT solutions provider like Western Digital to choose the open source path, today?
Open source innovation is in every major area of our business, starting from handheld devices to mobiles and embedded storage, to the data centre and the cloud. We held an Investor Day in December 2016, and encouraged customers to view our latest strategies on our investor microsite.
Being a leading storage solutions provider, our customers often ask for some standards-based solutions. Open source has been creating standards and leading innovation for some time now. We recognise and leverage it in our product and technology plans. It is one aspect of an innovation plan.
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Is it necessary to have strong community support for the success of an open source offering?
It is always good to have strong community support for an open source project. Companies like Western Digital work hard to build awareness and support for their open source offerings. Sometimes, a project may be small and niche -- appealing to only a few people. In such cases, it needs to serve only that small group. But in all other cases, a project needs to have broad and strong support from the community, in order to succeed. Some of the metrics we look at are the number of