“What we bring to the Indian Market is the ability to analyze and process much more data” – Eyal Waldman, Cofounder and CEO Mellanox Technologies
Mellanox Technologies is a leading global supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for enterprise data center. The company has had its footprint in India for a long time but now plans to spread its wings further in the country but establishing a direct base here. CEO Eyal Waldman talks about the company’s capabilities, developments and plans as Mellanox makes inroads into the Indian market.
Mellanox has been in India indirectly through its technology partners since the last 10 years, mainly in the high performance computing space. They have had successful long-term deployments with large organizations like the Tata Group; top Government agencies, National Stock Exchanges, Meteorological Department and top Universities for supercomputers in Infini band. Now, the Israel-based networking pros plan to expand in the county and take its business from this Beachhead into commercial and enterprise entities like it has done in other major markets like United States and China.
Eyal Waldman who co-founded the company back in 1999 and is also the President and CEO says, “If you look at where Mellanox is today, the larger share of our business comes from supercomputers, the next is Web2 and Cloud. We have 4 out of the 5 Web2 big guns (Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft) in the US as our clients.”
Mellanox is a leader in terms of capabilities like surveillance, cyber protection capabilities, financial services, fraud detection and electronic transactions. In the media and entertainment space where there are large files with very high resolution to render, process and manipulate; Mellanox has a strong presence in the US.
Importance of Faster Data Processing
New innovative technologies like AI and Cognitive computing and their deployments have made it mandatory to have extremely efficient processing and analyzing of data today. Eyal states, “AI is another example where we are seeing machine learning capabilities, for example, Baidu, how we help them with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Cars like Tesla too produce a lot of data about 20MB every minute. This data in order to be processed needs to go to the data center and in real time, manipulated, stored, retrieved and processed, and then it goes back to the car with answers or conclusion. As we see more people with autonomous driving, it will create more data and require more data in very real time.”
In other industries like smart cities and surveillance, there is a lot of video data. Eyal believes that a major amount of video produced by cameras in India isn’t processed, and less than 20% of the data is being utilized currently. We can improve this significantly because we move much more data. “Paypal, just for an example, is using us for fraud detection, and they can do over 4 billion data insertions in real time in order to analyze frauds. Without Mellanox, the amount of data being moved would be much less and so the fraud detection would be lower.” He adds, “In cybersecurity or terrorist threat detection, you need to intercept and analyze data, whether its video or audio in real time. We are helping agencies in the US, China and in other places of the world and using our Interconnect they can analyze videos, still pictures, and prevent things or analyze and find the culprits post attacks.”
Eyal believes that India has a lot of potential, “We are talking to multiple enterprises and e-commerce companies. We want to bring the technology that is embedded and utilized all over the world, to the Indian enterprises. What we do is we make datacenters more efficient, so that the ROI is higher from compute and storage platforms.” He adds on Indian enterprise cloud infrastructure, “Today, most of the data produced in India, resides abroad, mainly in the US. In Europe we have seen a transition where European companies are opening their own clouds to manage and take responsibility of the data, because data is the next big resource. It is the gold of the future. So building clouds in India and storage capabilities for the data to reside in India will be very important and empowering for India.” For Cloud, Mellanox has an appliance and a blueprint of a very efficient cloud infrastructure called CloudX and Eyal believes this cloud appliance can be brought to Indian enterprises.
Targeting the Indian Market
Mellanox plans to commence operations before the end of the year with technology engagement capability in the country through local management. In terms of support, Mellanox is working with Wipro. Currently the company has Avnet as one of the channel partners in India, and two more distributors going to the lower markets. Mellanox products are sold across the country with more than 1000 plus installations. Eyal adds, “We will have a direct technology engagement within Mellanox and fulfillment mostly through partners. We go through multiple OEMs like IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Lenovo, NetApp and EMC.”
To increase penetration in India, Mellanox will be opening up a subsidiary and putting more resources on the ground. “Once we start seeing more traction, we might have a design center here for software support and development to help our customers in India to tune and customize some of the products for the Indian enterprises.” Mellanox also has plans for manufacturing in India for which it employs Flextronics’ services. Eyal elaborates, “We use Flex for manufacturing and they have plants here in India. We can open some production lines in India, once we see more revenue here. We use contract manufacturing and have tie-ups with USI in Taiwan, Sony in Japan and STMicro in France and Flex and USI China for board manufacturing.”
“We have capabilities in India and we might bring resources from Israel to help build the infrastructure in India, as we’ve done in Europe, Africa, US, Asia and China. You want to build the cloud, we make it very easy. Within a day we can completely build a cloud of 10 or even 100 servers.” In the HCI space, Mellanox has partners such as HP, Nutanix and IBM.
Future Roadmap
Eyal believes that Mellanox’s offering cater directly to the cost aspect of businesses through better utilization of the datacenter. Mellanox presently plans to bring 25, 50 and 100 gigabit capabilities this year followed by 200 gigabit in 2017-18 and continue to increase the capabilities of analyzing, provisions and making it more cost effective to manage and run data centers and clouds. “Right now we move the data, we will come with processing capabilities in 2017 and help more entities analyze the data going through the pipes that we have in the data center,” adds Eyal
Hopeful of making it big in India, Eyal remarks, “We expect to sell more than 800Mn USD this year and India is a single digit out of that. Indian datacenter performance is lagging 2-3 years behind the global standards today but India has the potential to leapfrog the West and China.” He continues, “We have the ability to analyze and process much more data. We expect more customers as what we bring to the Indian Market is the ability to analyze and process much more data and data is growing very fast all over the world, it is the new gold. In India, with more than a billion in population, there is a lot of data to be processed. If you use Mellanox, you stay competitive, else you stay behind.”
By: Chitresh Sehgal – csehgal@accentinfomedia.com
