An Open Letter to an Open Ecosystem

When I joined Intel at the age of 18, I was deeply inspired – frankly, awestruck – at the prospect of working for a company with technology that can create a positive impact for so many people around the world. Forty years later, I still feel this way. And I believe this level of impact and depth of purpose should be open to all technologies, including every developer and every company. 

Innovation thrives in an open, democratized environment where people can connect, communicate, and respond together to new stimuli. Back in 1997, I introduced the Intel Developer Forum to bring together a diverse audience of developers, partners, and customers to shape the future of cross-platform technologies. This free exchange increased our ability to learn from one another.

Today’s technologists stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. At the dawn of the Information Age, enterprise, academia and government collaborated, building upon one another’s discoveries to create the foundations so pivotal to our world today: personal computing, the internet, the networks that make us a global society. There were healthy rivalries, but the ecosystem was open.   

Now more than ever, the challenges of the world demand innovation. They demand transparency. They are solved in the open. As one example, the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Frontera supercomputer played an instrumental role in mapping the novel SARS COVID-19 virus at the molecular and atomic levels early in the pandemic. Researchers needed these details to understand which medicines and vaccination approaches might most successfully fight and mitigate the disease. But the thousands of servers, hundreds of thousands of nodes, software infrastructure and modeling software necessary were not created overnight. Collaboration among universities, government agencies and corporations sought to solve critical challenges – like cancer and climate change – long before the current viral crisis overtook the globe.

An example like this shows how our collective future – our collective potential – is unlocked when we enable openness, choice, and trust among us.

This is why I fundamentally believe in an open source bias, which powers the software-defined infrastructure that transformed the modern data center and ushered in the data-centric era. Intel has a rich history in driving open platforms and industry-shaping standards like USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth – and many more – and all the APIs that enabled them. I believe in enabling all end-users, developers, partners and enterprises to be successful, because it drives renewed R&D excitement. And I believe a powerful, open ecosystem will always triumph. Only together can we ensure technology, which is inherently neither good nor evil, is ultimately applied for good.

Whether you create devices, mobile or desktop; enterprise systems, infrastructure on-premises or in the cloud; networks, wireless or platforms; whether you develop hardware or software; analyze IoT or big data; lead an established company or incubated startup; we must make an open ecosystem experience compelling, easy, secure and better.

This is why today Intel is making a pledge to openness. We will:

• Double-down on our deep legacy in open platforms, with the specific intention of enabling innovation and accelerating our shared future.
• Invest in open software stacks like Intel oneAPI and drive industry-shaping standards.
• Empower developer choice through collaboration with the broad ecosystem.
• Collaborate with our industry partners to solve systemic challenges of security and distribution.
• Work with academia and developers to innovate on future challenges like neuromorphic and quantum computing – all in the open.
• And, as is core to the Intel values, we will be inclusive in our approach and support of communities’ efforts, while embracing diversity and our differences because they make us better.

And this is why we’ve brought back the spirit of the Intel Developer Forum with our inaugural Intel Innovation event on Oct. 27 and 28, where I’ll be speaking more about the impact and importance of openness, choice and trust.

I call on fellow technologists and leaders to join me and commit once again to the power of an open ecosystem.

Tomorrow depends on it.