Impact’21 | Alan Benjamin, CEO and founder of GigaIO

Transcript of Alan Benjamin, GigalO CEO and Founder by Alan Olsen, Host of the American Dreams Show at Impact’21:

Alan Olsen: I’m visiting here today with Alan Benjamin, he’s a CEO and founder of GigaIO.

Alan Benjamin: Correct.

Alan Olsen: So Alan for the listeners who tell us about inspiration behind GigaIO your business vision and where you’re at with the company right now.

Alan Benjamin: Sure. Well, you know that the need, if you will, Alright, so let’s talk about why, why it exists. And if everybody has heard about the growth in artificial intelligence, and the growth in compute power, and the amount of data that is being created, and all of that is true, and now the issue becomes a given server, right? Think deep inside the data center, a given server is nowhere near physically large enough to be able to process all of that information. And so increasingly, people are using racks of servers, groups of servers, and it now becomes the connection between them. That is the biggest bottleneck. And that’s the problem we’ve concentrated on. So if you’re trying to manipulate large database, to be able to do artificial intelligence, then it’s going to the speed by which you can move that data, and you can move it from one processing unit to another will determine how fast you can get the entire job done. And so we run anywhere from 25 to 100 times faster than anything else out on the market.

Alan Olsen: Wow. So recently, in the, in the whole world of technology, there’s been a massive chip shortage. How has it impacted your business?

Alan Benjamin: Well, on one hand, you know, we also get affected by, you know, making it more difficult to get chips. But on the other side, our customers quite naturally now want to do more with the equipment that they have. And if you take as an example, everyone’s heard about GPUs and the phenomenal growth of Nvidia as a company. And if you take a GPU and stick it inside of a server, industry statistics say the utilization on a GPU will be about 15%. Now, if you can’t get your hands on GPUs, the most obvious place to get your computing power that you need is to be able to use them more than 15%. And on average, our customers are getting between 60 and 75% utilization out of those same GPUs. So if you can’t get new ones, use the ones that you have, because they’re certainly sitting there not being used.

Alan Olsen: When you look at the market share, where’s your target market right now? Or how do people come to become a user of GigaIO?

Alan Benjamin: So if you look at, you know, the market itself, it’s really you would say, what’s the what’s the market for data centers and the infrastructure that sits inside? Right, and the equipment that is moving that information, right, the networking and fabric equipment, and it’s this year, it’s about an 18 and a half billion dollar market? Right? So substantial size in market is growing at the rate of 30% a year right now, because of the growth of artificial intelligence. And so, you know, the most common customer coming to us right now, are enterprises. That are they’ve, they’ve been in the scientific and engineering area for a long time. And so they have a certain infrastructure for that. And increasingly, their sales department, their marketing departments, their manufacturing, even their engineering are starting to move into artificial intelligence workflows. And so they look around and they say, How am I going to run this? And they look over to that engineering infrastructure, but the workflow is completely different. So they want in a capability of being able to change this infrastructure through a series of software, right? They really want to turn this static infrastructure into something flexible. And that’s what that’s what GigaIO enables them to do.

Alan Olsen: What stage is a company at right now?

Alan Benjamin: So we, we started shipping product right before the COVID shut down. Which was, you know, in a lot of ways, it was great to get the product done by them. But, you know, a lot of customers were paused, if you would, in terms of doing evaluations. But since the beginning of the year, evaluations are going fast and furious. And so, you know, sales momentum and market interest has increased markedly now for us,

Alan Olsen: Is your typical customer a data center or how would you define that ideal customer?

Alan Benjamin: Well, so we really run quite a gamut right? You know, at the end of the day, what do we do we we enable people to take that static infrastructure and make it flexible. So everywhere from the large cloud service providers, right, there’s significant interest there, through to the national labs, to universities, to the large corporates that are now bringing in that AI workflow, right? So across that board is where we’re saying the interest.

Alan Olsen: Person wants more information, how are they go ahead and contacting GigaIO?

Alan Benjamin: The best is come see us at our website. And the website is a Gigaio.com. Right? And you’ll see the phone number. We’re happy to talk to you, of course, fill out the form. We’d love to have a conversation with you. And there’s all kinds of data there.

Alan Olsen: Alan, thanks for being with us today on American Dreams.

Alan Benjamin: Thank you.

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

Alan Olsen, is the Host of the American Dreams Show and the Managing Partner of GROCO.com.  GROCO is a premier family office and tax advisory firm located in the San Francisco Bay area serving clients all over the world.

Alan L. Olsen, CPA, Wikipedia Bio

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