SambaNova November 2021

DIGITAL REPORT 2021

Drives AI Into a New Computing Era for the Energy Industry

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SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

DRIVES AI INTO NEW COMPUTING ERA FOR THE ENERGY INDUSTRY sambanova.ai

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SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

Marshall Choy, VP Product, and Director Vijay Tatkar outline SambaNova’s sharp growth, Dataflowas-a-service offering and broad range of industry AI opportunities

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t’s been quite a journey for SambaNova Systems since it was founded by a group of industry luminaries and tech experts in Palo Alto, California, in November 2017.

From humble beginnings at Stanford University, the company has grown to employ over 400 staff worldwide, which should increase by another 100 by the end of this year.

SambaNova secured $678 million in Series D funding, led by Softbank Group’s Vision Fund 2, in April, and has already picked up several prestigious awards, including recognition as a Gartner “Cool Vendor,” “Best AI Product for Next Generation Infrastructure” from CogX, and the VentureBeat “AI Innovation for Edge AI” award, among others.

Marshall Choy and Vijay Tatkar – respectively Vice President of Product and Director, Product and Partner Engagements– talk through the company’s meteoric rise and broad potential of industry opportunities.

Choy explains how two of its co-founders, Professor Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré, were serving at EE and CS departments, working on AI and ML algorithms and techniques, domain-specific languages, compilers and run-time technologies.

“They were specifically preparing for this transition of computing we’re going through right now – some refer to it as ‘Software 2.0’, and transition from the old world of transactional processing to AI computing, from ERP to deterministic written software,” said Choy, who worked previously at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, together with Tatkar.

“It became clear there was a need for a different type of infrastructure

SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

“Our goals are to extend our leadership position with AI and ML, and to continue putting a great deal of investment and resource toward growing our presence globally, beyond North America” MARSHALL CHOY

VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

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“We are at the cusp of the biggest computing transition that we’ve seen in decades”

that provided “Our goals are to greater flexibility extend our leadership and performance, position with AI and and so SambaNova ML, and to continue purpose-built a full putting a great deal stack of hardware of investment and and software, to run resource toward AI and ML workloads growing our presence more effectively than globally, beyond North conventional solutions.”

America.” Choy said.

It took a couple of “As well as expanding MARSHALL CHOY years to develop and our customer base, VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, prioritize the advanced and efforts around SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS research and implement market awareness, it into an industrialised, enterprise-ready we continue to invest heavily in growing solution. Today, it has been in market our R&D capabilities to deliver worldfor around a year, with product shipping class products.” to revenue customers across multiple Tatkar believes the AI domain is now industries and continents. SambaNova bigger than the internet in terms of recently accelerated its go-to-market revenue and cultural aspects. “I dabbled in and category creation strategy with the AI before, in the 80s and I’m super excited appointment of its first Chief Marketing to get back – it now has an unstoppable Officer, Amy D. Love. momentum,” he said.

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SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

MARSHALL CHOY TITLE: VP OF PRODUCT INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY; AI LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

EXECUTIVE BIO

“I came in with a developers’ tools background and have seen architectural inflection points – how the industry changed from CISC to RISC and from single core to multi-core, and now I believe we are at a new point, from general purpose architectures to DSAs, and compilers lead the way in terms of architecture and how the applications are going to be seen. I believe in ‘own the developer, own the market’; this breakthrough is also because of developers researching and developing incredible models.”

In the often-complex world of AI, SambaNova’s model is built on simplicity. “The world around us is innovating like crazy, and our job is to ensure that there is easy adoption to enable acceleration while breaking existing barriers,” added Tatkar.

SambaNova’s flagship Dataflowas-a-Service offering, an extensible AI services platform, enabling organisations to jump-start AI initiatives overnight by augmenting existing capabilities and staffing, revolutionising accessibility and empowering organisations in every industry to unleash AI’s vast potential with a simple subscription.

The platform is powered by DataScale, an integrated software and hardware platform delivering unrivaled performance and accuracy, scale, and ease of use built on SambaNova’s Reconfigurable Dataflow Architecture (RDA).

Choy said the market is fairly well bifurcated between leading edge innovators, fast followers, and even laggards – one of the real differences are levels of resource.

Leading innovators in the Fortune 20 companies, who have a great deal of financial backing and tend to be design

Marshall Choy is the Vice President of Product and has overseen the go-to-market of dozens of industry-leading enterprise hardware and software products.

Previously he was Vice President of Systems Product Management and Solutions Development at Oracle.

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SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

VIJAY TATKAR TITLE: DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY; AI

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA

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Vijay Tatkar is the Director of Product and Partner Engagements and has more than 30 years’ industry experience, producing leading edge products like Systems Management and Security Monitoring Cloud. Tatkar’s background also includes Developer Cloud Services, Performance and Code Security Analyzers, Compilers with World Record performance and ISV engineering services.

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shops in and of themselves; then everybody else is really looking towards more complete solutions.

“As a result, we’ve come out with a set of different products and services,” added Choy.

“For the Fortune 20s, we have DataScale, which is a complete platform for innovation.

The interface point for that system, at a developer level around writing python code, and integrating into open source ML frameworks, enables people to experiment with their own models. That’s a great starting point, because it allows them to focus on their own domains of expertise, rather than spending resources on optimising for a hardware platform “But there’s a broader set of folks who don’t have 3,000 data scientists – they have three, and may grow to six. So for them, we raise the level of abstraction of the stack to the highest levels at the application layer, so that their interface and our technology stack is merely making API

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NOTHING BEATS A PARTNER’S VALIDATION Tatkar said as a start-up, it’s all about partnerships, and at the beginning the line between partners and customers is very blurred. It started with companies providing technology to build their own platform, including key established storage partners as well as new nimble entrants.

calls from their application, and abstracting all the complexities of model development – everything else becomes seamless and invisible to the user, and they simply interact with SambaNova as an ML services provider.”

He said it has to satisfy the needs of different types of customers so they can deploy it at enterprise scale.

“The market is very mature on the enterprise side, but it’s still developing on the AI side, and that’s the exciting

VIJAY TATKAR

DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT, SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

DID YOU KNOW...

“ The world around us is innovating like crazy, and our job is to ensure there is easy adoption, and to enable acceleration while breaking existing barriers”

“We have partners who are technology and storage providers, and we are also working with partners who can take it to the next level, such as value added resellers (VAR), and system integrators (SI),” he said.

“With some of our early customers, like the Department of Energy (DoE), their delight at using our platform is extremely infectious, so when they talk about what gains they’re getting, that has a much larger effect on bringing others into the ecosystem – there’s nothing like a validation from a partner.”

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“ The energy industry is facing extreme pressure to modernize and become more operationally efficient – and that’s going to require transformational technologies, not incremental ones” MARSHALL CHOY

VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

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AWARDS FOR INNOVATION AND THE WORKPLACE

DID YOU KNOW...

What has been most heartening has been the steady stream of awards from a number of respected third party sources. Gartner named SambaNova in its Cool Vendors in AI Semiconductors report and has included the company in 7 “Hype Cycle” reports that track technology maturity and impact. SambaNova was also awarded Best AI Product in NextGeneration Infrastructure by CogX, included in CRN’s 10 Hottest AI Chip Makers in 2021, adjudged one of CRN’s 20 Coolest Tech Startups Of 2020, and the cherry on top was that it became Great Place to Work certified in 2021.

“It’s a great reflection from the industry,” said Choy. “It’s particularly satisfying to get the ones around innovation, such as ‘Great Place to Work’, which certifies businesses on an annual basis. Similarly while semi-conductors are part of our overall solution, we don’t actually sell them, and that recognition is hard earned and well received.”

part, growing that ecosystem to all our customers,” said Choy, who added it will be focusing on a number of industry verticals, from manufacturing and life sciences to energy, oil and gas, financial services, and the public sector.

“The energy industry is facing extreme pressure to modernise and become more operationally efficient – and that’s going to require transformational technologies, not incremental, so AI absolutely brings that potential into the lens for the energy sector.

“We have a lot of work in oil, gas and the renewables sectors,” Choy said. “There are a number of great opportunities across the sector. If you look at the energy sector, there is a forward-thinking mindset, and some of the facilities are among the most advanced IoT facilities in the world, so there is a strong fit with AI.” “We have noticed a lot of operators wanting something that’s more specific to the assets they own,” Choy continues.

“They have this conundrum of wanting to be efficient but often ‘doing it themselves’ – there is an appetite for more operatorspecific solutions. However, we’re in the early days of AI, and adoption depends on the digital maturity of organizations.”

Choy sees that the longer term view is that this technology transition in AI computing will be just as big, if not bigger, than the internet transition was a couple of decades ago. AI will be the main change agent for business and technology. He believes this is just the beginning, the likes of which we haven’t seen before, and the impact will be profound. “We are at the cusp of the biggest computing transition that we’ve seen in decades,” he says.

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