Company Interview: Voltaire Limited - Ronnie Kenneth, Chairman And CEO
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Ronnie Kenneth has been Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Voltaire Ltd. since early 2001. In addition to spearheading the development of Voltaire into the leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics, Mr. Kenneth has played a major role in the development of venture companies Iamba Technologies and Dynamics Direct. He was the lead force behind raising millions of dollars in funding for these startups. In 1997 and 1998, Mr. Kenneth was a general partner with Telos Venture Partners, a leading early-stage venture capital firm located in the Silicon Valley. He holds an MBA from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, Calif., and a bachelor's degree in computer science and economics from Bar Ilan University in Israel.
TWST: For the benefit of readers who might not be familiar with the company, please give us a brief history and overview of Voltaire Limited.
Mr. Kenneth: Voltaire (VOLT) is a global systems company that has its business headquarters in Chelmsford, Mass., and an R And D facility in Israel. We have additional sales offices around the world. What we have been focusing on almost from the beginning is the high-performance connectivity between servers in data centers. Historically in the computer industry, people used very big computers, known as mainframes. Then due to advances in CPU technology by companies such as Intel and AMD, as well as the advanced connectivity technology that we have, people were able to get to the capacity and performance of a mainframe by connecting together relatively small, off-the-shelf servers. Voltaire focuses on this kind of connectivity. This, combined with the virtualization technology available today, enables people to very effectively scale out to hundreds and thousands of servers, and that's really the foundation for cloud computing.
TWST: What are your key products and what are the latest innovations for those products?
Mr. Kenneth: Voltaire is a systems company, so first of all, we have two switching hardware platforms. One is based on InfiniBand, which is a very fast interconnect technology, and the other one is based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology. On top of that, we have layers of software that further enhance the application performance and provide the ability to manage fabrics that include hundreds and thousands of servers.
TWST: For those of us who aren't as tech-savvy, would you explain exactly what you mean by "computing fabrics," and how they serve to improve the performance of servers and data storage equipment?
Mr. Kenneth: If we look historically at data centers - and in high-tech, history goes back only 10 or 15 years - we see a very odd phenomenon. Many companies, especially Fortune 100 and even 500 companies, are building their IT infrastructures and spending billions of dollars on them, and yet the utilization of such infrastructures is not going above 30%, which is really not high. Given what we have gone through in the macro environment and economic world, people are looking into ways to become more and more productive and efficient in everything that they do. So one thing that has happened in the marketplace is people have asked themselves, "Could we do things more efficiently?" In parallel, there have been some really significant advances in technology development, such as the Nehalem CPU coming from Intel, high-speed InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnects coming from us, and virtualization technology for the servers.
As a result of these advances in technology, businesses can now start building their IT infrastructure in a different way, and move away from the inefficiency of high-end servers and mainframes. Now they can use commodity servers and scale them out to the hundreds and thousands, and get the performance and the efficiency that they are looking for. Again, this is the foundation of cloud computing, and this is why I believe that cloud computing will be very successful. It is really allowing people to do more with less and improve the utilization of their IT infrastructure in a very significant way. What we provide is the ability to connect all these elements together and enable people to efficiently scale out, and get the capacity and performance they need. And how do we do that? We do this with our switches - InfiniBand switches as well as Ethernet switches - with application acceleration software and finally fabric management software. This software enables the IT operators to look at the complete infrastructure as one fabric at a high level of abstraction, so they can not only manage all these servers together, but also provision servers, virtual machines, switches and even storage on the fly. When you have this flexibility, obviously utilization goes up.
TWST: That seems to be one of the key benefits of the cloud-computing environment, that flexibility.
Mr. Kenneth: Absolutely. I would say that the number one advantage of cloud computing is efficiency - the improvement of the utilization of IT infrastructure that is relatively low today.
TWST: I was hoping you would talk a bit about who your larger customers and partners are. Is there a typical Voltaire customer?
Mr. Kenneth: First of all, our go-to-market model is based on selling to server OEMs. They take our products and integrate them into a solution, and then they put them in the hands of the end user. We have hundreds of end users around the world. In fact, I think that more than 30% of the Fortune 100 companies are using Voltaire technology today. As I said, we typically deliver products to these end users via the server OEMs. The largest ones for us in the U.S. are HP and IBM, and Fujitsu in Japan. We have others that are also doing business with us, like Dell and SGI, as well as Bull in Europe. But the largest ones are HP and IBM.
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