Interview with SPEC Chairman Walter Bays on the 2016 SPEC Asia Summit and Emerging Cloud & Big Data Benchmarks

From October 27‑29, 2016, SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) held its first Asian summit in Beijing, marking the organization’s inaugural event in China. The summit was livestreamed, and ZD至顶网 interviewed SPEC chairman Walter Bays to explain SPEC’s mission and the summit’s objectives.

Walter Bays, a board member since 1989 and current SPEC chair, highlighted that SPEC is a non‑profit entity that creates, updates, and certifies performance benchmarks for computing systems, enabling users to compare hardware and software and helping vendors improve real‑world performance.

He described SPEC’s global membership of about 120 organizations from 30 countries, including hardware and software vendors, universities, and research institutes, as well as end‑users who access free performance reports or run licensed tests.

Bays explained that Asia, especially China, is the fastest‑growing enterprise IT market, prompting SPEC to engage with Chinese industry and academia, foster long‑term collaboration, and attract more Asian members to benefit from SPEC’s benchmark insights.

The interview also covered how SPEC benchmarks guide product selection by comparing performance metrics, such as speed improvements or specific parameters like RU counts and price, allowing users to customize evaluations for their environments.

Addressing cloud computing and big data, Bays announced the release of SPEC Cloud IaaS 2016, the first benchmark measuring cloud elasticity, scalability, instance provisioning time, and error rates, and noted ongoing research on cloud‑related benchmark definitions and big‑data workloads.

He further mentioned plans to offer SPEC benchmarks as cloud services, establishing standard tests for object storage, document storage, and event‑driven systems, with participation from Chinese users to support cloud and big‑data adoption.

Looking ahead, Bays emphasized the need for new benchmarks that address emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence, and stressed the importance of observing market trends, gathering feedback, and encouraging broad user involvement to shape future SPEC initiatives.