Twenty-seventeen was a blur of excitement, and we've only just started the high-stakes work of positioning ourselves among the most innovative technology solutions on the market. Since we came out of stealth in March and are delivering general availability of Liqid Composable in Q1 2018, Liqid -- as a company and a concept -- is being adopted by the IT users that composable will benefit most. Those who are looking to the future of computing named Liqid a key player in the advancement of the industry, and ZDNet, for example, included us among its most exciting new technologies to emerge in the past year.
What does this mean for our work? It means that not only do our target users more fully understand the need for and capabilities of composable infrastructure, but also that thought leaders and decision makers see Liqid's approach as exactly what it is: an investment in the next era of computing.
The industry, which knows too well the current limitations of static data center infrastructure, can now clearly see a future of computing free of previous analog restraints, disaggregated and driven by advancements in GPU technologies, storage, networking and PCIe fabric. Liqid delivers the kind of adaptive, high-performance architecture needed for driving advancements across multiple applications: machine learning and AI; infrastructure automation; IoT data calculations; peer-to-peer GPU-driven, high-performance computing; and much more.
What Liqid does, as a company and with our technology, was explained using all kinds of language in 2017 as the industry began to understand the implications of Liqid Composable. While eWeek did call us "spelling-challenged," they also hailed Liqid as creating “a new infrastructure for the age of artificial intelligence." VentureBeat exclusively covered our partnership with Orange Silicon Valley, describing Liqid Composable as uniquely designed "for the on-demand economy." Gabriel Sidhom, VP of tech at OrangeSV, likened Liqid's work to "liquefying" infrastructure to make it "as flexible as using and paying for water through a utility."
SearchDataCenter highlighted the top names pushing composable — creating new paths to "SDDC nirvana" — and made clear what sets Liqid apart from the pack. VMware, for example, long boosted SDDC to try to promote their vRealize and vSphere, but the timing and the services weren't the perfect match. Liqid's managed switching fabric concept, Liqid Grid, is easy to understand: ours is a powerful management tool that automates, orchestrates, and composes physical servers from pools of bare-metal resources on-demand. Leveraging industry-standard data center components, Liqid delivers a flexible, scalable architecture built from pools of disaggregated resources. We offer the right size for the right application, even as targets move by the microsecond.
Presence at Open Compute Project, GPU Technology Conference, Siggraph, Supercomputing 2017, Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Data Center Conference, and other industry events in 2017 provided a great opportunity to review a bedrock question for any company in its early stages: What do people want? Being the first company to scale GPU as a bare-metal resource is huge to our customer base. As the first provider able to truly pool and scale GPU resources in tandem with CPU, SSD, and networking, we conducted several demonstrations with GPU powerhouse NVIDIA and other partners like One Stop Systems, Kingston, Inspur, and other industry leaders driving advancements in data center architecture. Consensus is growing that composable infrastructure is critical to support the extremely high-density workloads associated with advancements in everything from autonomous logistics to digital content creation and distribution.
We believe the future of the data center is composable and that 2018 will see users of the world’s most demanding applications begin to make the switch en masse to manage the data demands of the emerging Age of Artificial Intelligence. We plan to continue our work with key customers, partners, the investment community, and thought leaders across vertical markets. To that end, we begin 2018 having scored some major industry firsts, and we’re just getting started. As Built in Colorado has noted, it's going to be an exciting and revealing year.
