Contents:
Exit: Rockset
Pathfinder One-On-One: Ali Wasti
Market Perspective: Networking Technology
Inside Our Portfolio: Q&A with Cohesity's Kit Beall
Pathfinder at HPE Discover 2024: Showcasing Innovation and Celebrating Success
Munch and Learn Technology Talk: Hybrid Classical-Quantum Workflows on HPE Supercomputers
Portfolio Company News
Welcome to the September edition of Pathfinder Insights! As we transition into the fall season, we’re excited to bring you the latest updates and insights from Hewlett Packard Pathfinder and its portfolio companies. This month, we celebrate the news of OpenAI's acquisition of Rockset—a move set to redefine real-time data processing in AI. We extend our warm congratulations to the Rockset team on this remarkable achievement. Our Senior Managing Director, Ali Wasti, provides his perspective on Rockset's exit and the broader implications for the industry.
Next, in our Networking Technology Perspective, we examine how this technology is crucial for modern enterprises amidst the growing demands from Generative AI applications like ChatGPT. We also explore strategic insights shared by Cohesity's CRO, and review Pathfinder's presence at the HPE Discover 2024 conference, where our startups showcased their innovative solutions and garnered significant recognition.
Looking ahead, we're excited to preview an upcoming webinar featuring a collaboration between HPE and portfolio company Classiq, focusing on the intersection of classical and quantum computing in advanced workflows.
Exit: Rockset
Over the summer, OpenAI announced it was acquiring Pathfinder portfolio company Rockset. Rockset has consistently demonstrated its ability to empower businesses by enabling real-time actions from increasingly large and complex data sources.
By integrating Rockset’s advanced technology, OpenAI will significantly enhance its retrieval infrastructure across various products, further solidifying its position as a leader in AI advancements.
Pathfinder extends our congratulations to the entire Rockset team on this well-deserved achievement and looks forward to witnessing the exciting developments that will emerge from this powerful collaboration with OpenAI.
Pathfinder One-On-One: Ali Wasti
Following Rockset's exit, we had the opportunity to sit down with Ali Wasti, Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Investments at Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, to get his perspective on the acquisition.
1. How does OpenAI plan to incorporate Rockset's real-time capabilities?
OpenAI’s AI models need large data inputs for accurate results. Integrating Rockset’s technology will speed up data ingestion and processing, enabling faster model training and more efficient inference. OpenAI plans to leverage Rockset’s real-time technology to power its “retrieval infrastructure” used to access and ingest data for training and inference.
In addition, as OpenAI continues to enhance features for its existing and new product offerings (e.g., SearchGPT), Rockset’s highly efficient and scalable real-time data indexing and querying abilities are critical to delivering performant experiences across products that are increasingly compute and data intensive.
2. What do you see as the strategic advantage for OpenAI in acquiring Rockset?
This acquisition will give OpenAI’s customers the ability to transform their data into actionable intelligence to ultimately strengthen their competitive edge. Rockset has an innovative and proven team with unique capabilities, enabling OpenAI to continue to be at the forefront of the next wave of AI innovations. By integrating Rockset's vector search technology for data retrieval, OpenAI aims to improve the efficiency of its applications and ultimately deliver greater value to its customers.
3. What broader trends in data management and security are you seeing that are driving acquisitions like Rockset by OpenAI?
Pathfinder is seeing increased activity around the data layer, as enterprises realize the challenge of data management and security within the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) context. Highlighting this dynamic, two Pathfinder portfolio companies have been acquired in the last several months: Rockset by OpenAI and Arcion by Databricks. Arcion’s data ingestion and replication capability will extend Databricks’ ability to access distributed enterprise-wide data for AI applications.
Market Perspective: Networking Technology
Networking technology plays a critical role in supporting modern enterprises and society, especially with the rising demand from Generative AI applications such as ChatGPT.
To remain competitive amidst unprecedented network demands, enterprises are investing in advanced networking solutions encompassing hardware, software, and communication protocols across Wide Area Networks (WANs), Local Area Networks (LANs), and edge devices. Fundamental components such as routers, switches, security software, and access points work together to ensure efficient and secure data transmission. Innovations that enhance those fundamentals are occurring in areas like Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and high-speed data center switches tailored for AI workloads.
The networking industry is predominantly controlled by major players like Cisco, Juniper Networks, Huawei, and HPE athough certain segments such as Secure Service Edge (SSE) and data center switches are witnessing increased competition and rapid advancements. In particular, companies like Nvidia and Arista are developing ultra high-speed switches to meet AI data center needs, while white-box switches are gaining popularity for their ability to be customized. Pathfinder continues to build its investment thesis in networking technologies aligned with these evolving market dynamics and aims to focus on areas including SASE, various types of switches, Wi-Fi access points, and network management software. Potential expansion of HPE’s networking portfolio underscores Pathfinder's commitment to supporting innovations that shape the future of networking technology.
Click here to explore networking component fundamentals, a market overview, and where AI is making an impact.
Inside Our Portfolio: Q&A with Cohesity's Kit Beall
Welcome to the latest edition of our series, "Inside Our Portfolio", where we engage in insightful conversations with leaders from our portfolio companies. This series aims to provide you with firsthand perspectives from those at the forefront of innovation and growth.
In this issue, Paul Glaser (Head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder and Investor Relations) interviews Kit Beall, the Chief Revenue Officer of Cohesity, a key startup in our portfolio since 2017, with whom we have built a successful joint go-to-market partnership.
PG: What does Cohesity do?
KB: Cohesity enables companies to secure, protect, and extract value from their data wherever it exists—across the data center, edge, and cloud. Our focus is on helping customers mitigate cybersecurity threats and recover quickly from disruptions, making their businesses more resilient. Customers trust Cohesity because of our speed, security, simplicity, scale, and smarts. We also have the fastest speed of cyber recovery of any data protection vendor, allowing our customers to return to normal business operations quickly.
We also continue evolving with new security capabilities for the Cohesity Data Cloud, and ways to derive insight from data, like our first-to-market AI-powered enterprise search assistant, Cohesity Gaia.
PG: How has Cohesity’s business evolved, and what are you working on today?
KB: Over a decade ago, data was highly fragmented across multiple silos, and there was little innovation in the backup space, so customers were managing backup products that didn’t scale and were hard to recover data from. Cohesity was founded with the idea that you could dramatically simplify customers’ lives by simplifying data management and modernizing backups and data protection. With that vision at our core, we architected a platform so that customers could secure their data, manage it, and do more by harnessing that data to drive insights - all in one place and on one platform.
We’ve continued to evolve our platform over the last ten years, embracing things like powerful security features to make it easier to find threats and more quickly to recover from incidents. Recently, we expanded our AI solutions to embrace Retrieval Augmented Generation to power Cohesity Gaia, our first-to-market AI-powered enterprise search assistant. That core vision from a decade ago is still our vision today, and it's the reason we continue to push to disrupt the industry with modern innovations to change further how organizations harness their data's power.
Click here to read the full interview.
Pathfinder at HPE Discover 2024: Showcasing Innovation and Celebrating Success
The HPE Discover 2024 conference was a success, attracting significant traffic and industry leaders, partners, and customers. One of the highlights was the first corporate keynote at Sphere, where NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE was announced, a solution set to unleash generative AI's potential in the enterprise.
Pathfinder was part of the HPE Startup Innovators Pavilion, a space bustling with activity. Attendees explored a curated selection of startups from the Pathfinder, HPE Tech Advance, Digital Catalyst, and Technology Partner programs including sponsors such as BigID, TrojAI, Sparkflows, UbiOps, ZEDEDA, and Loadbalancer. These startups are addressing HPE customers' challenges through joint technical and business development, showcasing HPE’s commitment to innovation and diversity.
Beyond the Pavilion, Pathfinder portfolio companies Cohesity, Scality, and Weka had dedicated booths to showcase their offerings. In addition, Scality, Cohesity, and BigID also participated in the HPE Innovation Campus Theater to provide attendees with valuable insights into the latest advancements and collaborative efforts driving the future of technology.
Finally, we are thrilled to announce that two of our portfolio companies, Cohesity and Aleph Alpha, received awards at the 2024 HPE Partner Awards for their exceptional contributions to the HPE ecosystem. Pathfinder remains dedicated to fostering innovation through strategic collaborations and looks forward to continuing this journey of discovery and transformation with our partners and the broader technology ecosystem.
Munch and Learn Technology Talk: Hybrid Classical-Quantum Workflows on HPE Supercomputers
Join the HPE Developer Munch and Learn webinar titled "Hybrid Classical-Quantum Workflows on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Supercomputers." This one-hour session will dive into the collaboration between Hewlett Packard Labs, the central research community of HPE, and Classiq, revealing how hybrid classical-quantum workflows are creating new possibilities in the field of supercomputing.
Date: October 16, 2024
Time: 5:00 PM CET (8:00 AM PST)
Speakers:
• Aniello Esposito, Principal Research Engineer, HPE
• Tamuz Danzig, Quantum Application Engineer, Classiq
• Erik Garcell, PhD, Head of Technical Marketing, Classiq
Why Attend?
Quantum computing is rapidly advancing, offering the potential to solve complex problems far more efficiently than classical systems. However, while quantum devices excel in specific areas, classical supercomputers continue to be indispensable for data-intensive workloads. This webinar will provide an insightful overview of how the collaboration between Hewlett Packard Labs and Classiq is paving the way for hybrid workflows that seamlessly integrate quantum devices with classical supercomputers.
Register now to be part of this exciting discussion on the future of supercomputing.