Dr. Tzi-Cker Chiueh, General Director of ITRI’s Information & Communications Research Laboratories, stressed in the Summit that ITRI’s unique Hardware as a Service (HaaS) feature can help operators strengthen their management mechanisms and provide flexible cloud application services. He also introduced a successful example of IOD commercial operation by a Japanese telecom provider, indicating that ITRI’s services enabled the business to dominate the private corporate cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud markets while maintaining low costs and high efficiency.

OpenStack's market prospects look remarkably bright. Research organization 451 Research predicts that its market size will grow to US$5 billion by 2020—a compound annual growth rate of 35%. Dr. Chiueh remarked that ITRI sees the potential in OpenStack and has used the architecture to develop its all-in-one data center management system, IOD, which helps businesses take a competitive advantage in the cloud industry by reducing the costs of building data centers and server rooms. Furthermore, ITRI has developed HaaS, which integrates virtual and physical machine rental services to provide a commercial operation platform for cloud data centers.

In the collaboration with a major Japanese telecom provider to construct a data center, ITRI’s HaaS service and the BAMPI (Bare-Metal Provisioning from ITRI) were applied for server deployment, vastly reducing the system installation time from 288 man-hours to 1.5 man-hours, a 200-fold increase in efficiency. This not only greatly reduces the labor costs for cloud data center deployment, but also lowers the likelihood of installation errors, enabling telecom providers to offer more competitive services.

ITRI's HaaS service integrates server deployment, network monitoring, and host management, providing a total host leasing solution that can deliver a tenfold increase in supply efficiency speed and a twenty-fold reduction in labor costs for data center operators. When a rental request is received, the rental server can be activated within a mere 6 minutes—a task which usually requires at least two days to complete using current server technology. HaaS can help operators to lower server room construction costs, add flexibility to the lease period, and rapidly respond to customer needs while providing operators with real-time monitoring of computing and network resources, which is crucial when exploring cloud industry market.