Open Compute Project (OCP)-certified equipment saw strong adoption throughout 2019 across most regions but fell short of expectations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market, a recent Omdia report found.

The report, which surveyed 21 companies leading the charge in OCP hardware adoption, found that revenue among non-board member companies grew 40% in 2019 reaching $3.6 billion. OCP products now account for a little over 2% of the global IT infrastructure market, said Vladimir Galabov, principal analyst of data center compute at Omdia.

Galabov, alongside Omdia Executive Director of Research Cliff Grossner, discussed the findings of the report, as well as their predictions for OCP's trajectory over the next three years.

North America remained an OCP stronghold throughout 2019, said Galabov, but it was Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) which exceeded expectations.

"For 2019, EMEA showed very good growth," he said, adding that the "circular market economy" and push for lower power consumption helped to drive OCP adoption in the region. "The U.K. government has really hammered down in their plans to focus on power efficiency, and I think that is really going to be a force for positive demand within the immediate public sector for OCP equipment," he added.

Grossner explained that the circular economy refers to the ability to re-certify racks that have otherwise reached the end of life for less demanding workloads.

In the North American Market, Omdia found OCP continued to gain traction among telecommunications companies, which reported widespread deployments of OCP equipment in centralized data centers and colocations. OCP's cell-site gateway specification was particularly popular with telecoms. According to Grossner, several large telecoms, which have completed rolling out OCP cell-site routing technologies, are turning to core routing.

Galabov also observed an uptick in proof-of-concept (POC) trials of the OCP open edge server specifications among telecoms and enterprise customers. He added that while it wasn't particularly surprising to see telecommunication operators adopting the technology, the enterprise hadn't been anticipated.

"There has been good interest from enterprises in deploying compute at the edge," Galabov said. "This is something often overlooked in the industry and you should not underestimate the amount of demand for low-latency enterprise applications that require edge computing."

In addition to telecom and enterprise, Grossner said they also found that open edge initiatives were seeing adoption in the oil and gas industry.

OCP-hardware also saw strong support among colocation providers, which has become an increasingly important market segment.

"We saw for the first time that some colocation vendors have become certified as being able to handle OCP-certified equipment, providing an alternative to enterprises that are running data centers that aren't yet able to handle OCP equipment," Grossner said.

It wasn't all good news for the OCP in 2019, with the consortium missing the mark in APAC.

"We expected that we would see Asia-Pacific adopt open compute equipment, especially hyperscale service providers in Asia-Pacific in larger volumes," Galabov explained.

Despite this setback, Omdia anticipates that this will start to change within the next year.

"Going forward, we do expect there will be pretty good demand from enterprises, from tier-two cloud service providers and I do expect that eventually a number of hyperscale cloud service providers will be interested in OCP equipment," he said of APAC countries.

Both Galabov and Grossner expect OCP adoption to continue to grow, forecasting a 5% market penetration and $11.8 billion in non-board member company revenues by 2023.

But to achieve this, Grossner says OCP will need to overcome the challenges preventing wider-scale appeal. One of the biggest factors holding back adoption is a lack of name recognition and perceived risk.

"Even though we may be very familiar with it [OCP], that equipment isn't really all known in many corners of the market yet," Grossner said. "That means it's perceived as having a higher risk."

Meanwhile, some enterprise customers simply aren't ready to make the operational changes necessary to adopt OCP technologies.

"What we've found is there are few local supply chains that are springing up to provide support and warranty along with local replacement upon failure," he said. "We need more."

Galabov explained that OCP form factors also remain a barrier for customers.

"For the enterprise market to continue to grow at the trajectory that we're forecasting, it is important that we see system integrators become an intrinsic part of the OCP ecosystem because they are key to satisfying enterprise demands," he said.

Adoption of OCP-hardware among colocation providers is also on the rise, but there are still too many facilities that don't support hyperscale form factors, Galabov added.