When A Thousand Times Faster Threatens Your Job
A 10% improvement is incremental. A thousand times faster is disruptive
Taking a disruptive technology to market is a lot of fun and excitement - and if you have not done it before, the journey has predictable stops.
While these stops are part of the process, and those of us bringing disruptive technology to market know them well, we like to share them with readers so you can join us in the journey.
Imagine this:
You are sitting with the CIO (chief info officer) of a large corporation in his office, with a glass wall showing his beautiful data center. Lights and raised floors, organized cables - you’ve seen them on TV.
His team of SQL mid managers sits around the table, with their VMware and Oracle logowear proudly displayed.
You were asked to demonstrate if you could take their energy forecasting application, which is a critical app for the corporation - they use it to determine every morning if they are buying or selling energy on the open market - and speed it up.
Currently the application runs in 11 hours.
It forecasts the energy usage for about 10,000 of their millions of customers. It can only run these small samples because to run millions of customers’ energy forecast would take days - and they have only 11 hours.
Why 11 hours?
If they miss the window, when the futures markets open, they don’t know if they are buying or selling energy - and it’s a multi-million dollar bet.
You whip out your computer and log on to your system through their firewall, the application showing on the large monitor at the head of the long table.
You explain that you did not quite do the application the way they asked.
Instead of running the bills for a sample of their customers, you ran the bills for their entire multi-million customer system.
Instead of running the bill for the last month, you ran the bills for the last 10 years of history - and one month.
Instead of using the cloud or Amazon or Microsoft, you ran everything on a $6,000 Intel NUC computer, the size of cigar box. Maybe 2 cigar boxes.
Then you run the application.
Instead of 11 hours, the entire application runs in less than 12 minutes - generating the precise energy bet to put down on the markets.
Wow, you just showed this group they can revolutionize their entire enterprise with a new tech stack. They can eliminate the most CPU-hogging SQL application in their entire portfolio.
You know they are going to thank you - they are going to look like heroes.
And you would be wrong.
Instead, the room is in silence.
Everyone kind of shuffles around, there are a few questions about the final calculation - then the CIO thanks you and says they will get back to you.
He never does.
He does not return your calls or your emails.
Ghosting is not just a dating thing, it’s what a CIO does when you just showed him his empire, on which a $450,000 annual compensation rests, on which a staff of 1,890 people rests - can be replaced without a data center and with only a handful of people - generating quantum level improvements.
It happens often.
Another example:
The retired EVP of Marketing for one of the world’s largest transportation firms knows the CIO well.
He asked us to do a Zoom call with the CIO - a famous guy in the space, the one speaking at many of the big conferences. The same CIO who tells the world about how they moved to 100% “cloud-native” applications - or will over the next decade.
We get on the Zoom call and do the pleasantries.
This CIO has to take the call, as he does many, because he is a nice guy and knows his importance brings him these types of calls with otherwise useless potential vendors.
One of our engineers explains how Fractal takes applications that require a data center and reduces them to a $100 Raspberry Pi (it’s an itsy-bitsy computer) that this firm could put into every one of their thousands of vehicles.
This conversation starts to have legs - you can tell from the reactions - this is scratching where they are itching.
The conversation goes to “how.”
How can Fractal take almost any application that requires a massive cloud, with hundreds of million dollars just spent and soon to be spent on “cloud-native” apps, and eliminate not only the cloud but place a data center in every vehicle for $100?
The next bend in the conversation is the engineer showing how Fractal reduces I/O, which you will remember from earlier posts (not everyone on this Substack is an IT person) to such a degree that you do not need a cloud or a data center.
The CIO said “…for 30 years, every single challenge we had has to do with reducing I/O!
Wow, you guys finally cracked the code!
So, you the reader think we just told this this guy how to revolutionize his company. And, sadly, again you would be wrong.
His first reaction was his transportation company, with slim margins, in a highly competitive space could leapfrog competitors with new services and lower costs.
His second reaction is he just sold the board of directors a $350 million 5 year plan, to move all its applications to cloud-native, to Amazon’s cloud, and if he even brought in Fractal for a single application, he was toast.
Since we’ve seen this movie in earlier parts of our lives, we know in advance this will be the result and we pretty much never sell to the IT department.
There are better ways and we are going to share them on this Substack and on our other site JayValentine.com.
About 3 months ago we had a call with some fellows from one of the world’s larger private equity firms. If you don’t know, private equity is not venture capital. It’s kind of venture capital shoved down your throat, like it or not.
The call with the private equity guys led to usual challenge - if you guys have such cool technology, why isn’t everyone using it?
So we told a story similar to the one above.
Instantly, they got it.
They said the way to get Fractal into some of these hidebound, bureaucratic organizations, where the CIO is a technology gatekeeper, is to have a private equity company - who makes billions by taking fat out of otherwise recalcitrant companies - let them help you out.
And we are.
So there are a lot of ways to take massively disruptive technology to market. One of those is private equity and we are now making the rounds.
There are other ways as well, and here on the Substack we are going to share them with you as we take another disruptive technology to market.
Come along and enjoy the ride.
FractalComputing Substack is a newsletter about the journey of taking a massively disruptive technology to market. We envision a book about our journey so each post is a way to capture some fun events.
Subscribe at FractalComputing.Substack.com
Fractal Website: Fractal-Computing.com
Jay@FractalWeb.App
Portions of our revenue are given to animal rescue charities.