In the past couple of months, I’ve had the pleasure of conversing with two CEOs who are setting out to do nothing less than change the tech world. Their goal is to not only capitalize on the new developments in enterprise IT – changes that we’ve chronicled in this newsletter and the VORTEX conference – but to knock the current leaders, the big boys, right off their perches.
I feel sorry for the person who can’t get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile.
Walter Chrysler
Dear Vorticians,
A happy and prosperous new year to you!
You know, I’m a sucker for enthusiasm. Over nearly 22 years covering the technology industry I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many entrepreneurs and savvy IT executives. I’ve always been captured by the energy and zeal of the real innovators – the people who want to set the industry on its ear.
Over the past few years, it’s been tougher to find such groundbreakers. With the enterprise IT field in rehab, there was far more emphasis on cost-reduction and incremental improvement vs. real, bet-the-barn kind of innovation.
But, in the past couple of months, I’ve had the pleasure of conversing with two CEOs who are setting out to do nothing less than change the tech world. Their goal is to not only capitalize on the new developments in enterprise IT – changes that we’ve chronicled in this newsletter and the VORTEX conference – but to knock the current leaders, the big boys, right off their perches.
This week, I want to introduce you to Stephen DeWitt, CEO of Azul Systems. When I spoke with DeWitt this week about Azul’s so-called network-attached processing systems – more on what that means in a second – he started off by saying that Azul’s launch will be “one of the biggest stories of 2005.” Later, he told me that what Azul will deliver will “shatter the economics of computing.” No wallflower he.
Now here’s what lies behind this bravado. DeWitt says that traditional computing architectures – like x86 or Sparc-based systems – are not designed to deal with new applications built with Java, J2EE or .Net (virtual machine-based applications). These applications are very demanding and they don’t behave well enough for users to get any real scalability out of today’s machines.
Grids, virtualization and on-demand, according to DeWitt, are attempts to mask the limitations of those traditional computing architectures, but they are complicated and clumsy ways of solving the new application problem.
So, the folks at Azul Systems are branching off in a completely new direction. They’ve built a box called a network-attached processing system that utilizes completely new multi-core microprocessors. Each chip has 24 processors on it and each box can house up to 16 chips, for a total potential capacity of 384 processor cores, along with 256G-bytes of memory.
Linked to existing servers, the NAP enables the virtual machine based apps to call on a huge pool of computing power as needed, attaining what DeWitt claims is linear scalability. (By the way, DeWitt is the former CEO of Linux systems vendor Cobalt Networks, which he sold to Sun for a sunny $2 billion in the shiny days of 2000.)
It sounds too good to be true, but DeWitt says the NAP is in customer sites today and the beta tests are going swimmingly. We’ve heard that before and we remain professionally skeptical, though personally excited by the prospect that it could actually be true. I’m not sure why I slipped into the royal we there, but as my mother is fond of reminding us, there’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.
But let’s say DeWitt and Azul are right about this. That would certainly put a ding in the business plans of anyone who makes their money selling loads of server boxes (and the processors that drive them) and anyone who see their future in selling software to link a whole bunch of server boxes together in a virtual environment.
And DeWitt has some powerful venture allies who believe Azul will be right. They include such blue-chip investors as Accel Partners, Austin Ventures, Comventures and Redpoint, among others.
Azul – and DeWitt – are definitely worth keeping an eye one. Next week, I’ll turn your attention to Bill Coleman and Cassatt.
Before I leave you, however, I want to ask your help on behalf of Vortician Axel Tillman, who asked me the following question – which I could not answer:
“I know that there are gazillions of reports out there about every market sizing there is. However, I need only one number and, if available, its breakdown: Worldwide number of networks.
“(It would be nice if) a breakdown of the number is available. For example, (but any breakdown would be fine):
% with nodes/users >10,000.
% with nodes/users 5000-9999.
% with nodes/users 1000-4999.
% with nodes/users below 1000.
“I would really appreciate if you could help me or point to someone who could help me. I will soon let you know in which context this fits.”
So, any answers? Let me know about that and any other topic by writing to jgallant@vortex.net.
Bye for now.
