Granulate’s AI Powered Optimization Software – Andrew Diaz, Granulate

This is texturing TV. I'm Bonnie Schneider with tech strong TV companies are using more Computing resources for their cloud and hybrid infrastructure in the digital age. They're looking for more ways to reduce their carbon emissions and of course reduce energy costs optimizing scalability resource, utilization compliance performance and security.

All of this has to occur. Well reducing carbon emissions and cutting energy costs, which naturally poses challenges. We'll joining me now on Tech strong TV is Andrew Diaz Chief strategy officer at granulate his company offers Sustainable Solutions for engineers devops and SRE as they focus on product Improvement Andrew.

Thanks so much for joining me on Tech strong TV. Thank you. Bonnie.

Glad to be here. Well, I'd love to hear more about your background beginning with your previous work at Intel and how you help them move into the cloud and Enterprise space and and then let's move into your new role. We'll ask us it's not that new but your rule your role and granulate and just also familiarize us with what granul it is and how it works.

Yeah, absolutely. So I've actually been with Intel and I'm still with Intel as granulated as an acquisition of Intel but been with Intel for 15 years, I've had a lot of different functional roles from Finance supply chain product management sales strategy and my last role was sort of Intel proper was driving the acquisition of granulate which is a israeli-based startup with 150 people that specializes in a product that optimizes applications for its customers. So in terms of my work with Intel, you know the rise of the cloud service providers in this new infrastructure option has created challenges and so instead of cios and looking at a server spec sheet in terms of what CPU is in there what memory Etc a lot of those details aren't available.

And so as I worked with Intel and my last sales strategy role the real issue. Challenge was the reality that the cloud has started to abstract some of the underlying infrastructure. And so the decision was made and what I ended up leading was the strategy to go ultimately higher up the tech stack and that led us to granulate and so granulate as I mentioned a sas-based solution providing better application performance that results in lower infrastructure requirements and in turn lower cost.

And so my job here now as a chief strategy officer of granulate. As often a soft and Tall the co-founders of granulate brought me on board post acquisition which closed in May of last year. So in addition to helping with the integration aligning with Executives of Intel in granulate and strategies that both companies, I also brought the Intel relationships.

So bringing Partners like Accenture and Deloitte Partners, like the cloud service providers like Azure AWS two granulate to help expose this new novel technology to the rest of the world. That is so interesting. I'd love to understand a little more about this novel technology.

It seems like we're asking cloud computing to do more all the time, you know with it with AI and everything. So how what is unique about granulated? What is unique in their technology?

Yeah. So granulate actually is one of the only application performance optimization Technologies. Meaning that there's a lot of optimization companies out there today that focuses on the underlying infrastructure granulate on the other hand actually analyzes applications and understands their patterns their flow their use of infrastructure and optimizes the specific applications without any code changes from the developers or the the customer and so this unique capability.

We see at Intel as a very unique differentiated opportunity for us to present to our customers in terms of providing them the Best in Class Hardware what they Best in Class application opportunity in order to Eyes their overall return on investment in terms of their it spend. Hmm. Well let's go ahead into the carbon footprint.

They had it reducing that. I know sometimes that's difficult to measure in terms of how much are you know, are we putting out there that is affecting it what have you done at Intel and now with granulate you have a better understanding about carbonate carbon, footprint and Energy Efficiency and through these processes. Yeah, I think you nailed it.

Right the difficulty is measuring the full carbon footprint of a given application or a given workload. But just to be clear, you know AWS Azure gcp they do have carbon footprint tools today that they provide to their customers, but they're all slightly different in terms of How It's calculated. So really in the root of the measurement question is is around how do these players in the industry make these tools as accurate as possible which will ultimately take Partnerships between you know, the likes of Intel the likes of SAS providers like granulate and the Cloud solution providers.

So for example in the public Cloud, it's not possible really to associate a specific energy consumption to a specific virtual machine. So in our experience, you know working with customers. They're really demanding this level of granularity down to the individual CPU core and being able to compare between different Cloud providers.

In addition to not only running the applications and the cloud environments. There's also multiple layers to consider. I think a lot of us think of, you know, sustainability or carbon footprint as associated with the you know, the underlying electricity required to run a given infrastructure.

However, there's also the cost to produce the infrastructure and that's where the partnership with Intel and the large cloud service providers really comes full circle in terms of aligning to Industry standards. And also aligning to overall goals in terms of what the industry is trying to get to from a sustainability perspective. That is interesting.

You're right. We do tend to think about well, how much power are we using and how much energy you know is is going into it. Can we break down that a little bit further into the whole process when we're looking at carbon footprint because I think that's an a different perspective to understand.

It's it's not just one thing. It's the big picture. Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, I think we're still early in this journey. So I think there's a lot of work still to be done. But for example, you know companies running their business applications in the cloud in the predominant Focus.

As I mentioned is what they call scope 3 admission, which is, you know, really the ability or capability and energy required to run the underlying infrastructure. And so, you know, some companies have actually begun to measure this and set goals accordingly as an example, you know, public companies Spotify is one if you look at their 2021 impact report their scope three admissions, we're 99% of their total emissions. And so what granulate has been able to do the granulated solution is actually an easy option that optimizes the application without changing the code and will consequently reduce that scope three carbon footprint through reduced infrastructure needs and so what we've been able to do with the available information and the industry we've been able to create in our dashboard our UI which is called G Center.

We then calculate the associated carbon footprint reduction in addition to the overall cost savings which has been, you know, primarily the the value add for our customers to date. Well explained that I'm glad that we dove into that. That's a really good nice overview of how that all works.

So let's talk about the cloud technology and the industry you've been you said, you've worked Intel 15 years. So you've seen this Evolution. Where can you talk about where where it was when you started and where it is now and where you see the whole Cloud technology going forward.

Yeah, so there's been quite a lot of innovation over the last few years as I said, you know the large hyperscalers hyperbided, you know dashboards to help inform the carbon footprint calculation for customers, but at this point it's still at a pretty high level as an industry. I think as we move forward the devil will really be in the details. And so just to give an example of what I'm referring to there are some studies available about the carbon footprint of runtime languages meaning one line of python code is more carbon intensive than Java.

Now I I can't speak to the accuracy of the studies but it goes it gives you a perspective on sort of the art of the possible. So unless you know those sorts of studies are supported by data and hopefully eventually they will be I think what you can start to see is that this sort of information can start to shape how applications are developed or how you know customers approach their overall it infrastructure. And so I think as we continue to move forward more and more data will be collected which will ultimately inform best practices for companies worldwide.

That that's interesting. I think that will be the topic of another tech trunks TV segment which line of data code uses more energy. I didn't know that that's a very interesting point.

I'll look for that study. Let's talk about organizations that are looking to adapt sustainable practices in the eye industry IT industry. What are what are some general advice that you would have for them?

Especially when they're looking towards their Cloud infrastructure? Yeah, so I think in general I approached this pretty simply and I think you can see you know intel was recognized by Barons as being the number one sustainability company in 2022. How did they do that?

It really was about embedding it in our in the company culture. So creating the right incentives and helping their employees understand the measurement of how they can evaluate their overall carbon footprint in the applications and then things that they do day in and day out and so by doing that in addition with the incentives at an individual level, it's possible for companies to really create that overall momentum in terms of you know, the same that it would be for Revenue goal, obviously for for companies, which I'm sure all of them have it's very necessary to create additional goals for sustainability in order to provide them with sort of that guiding. So that would be kind of step one and then step two.

Is that Baseline? What's the carbon footprint calculation today? And is it actionable data there may be measurements, but they may be measurements that can't be evaluated given a different actions taken by individuals as they're you know evaluating them.

And so that's really step two in terms of forming a plan in order to be more, you know, Carbon efficient. And then you know selfishly speaking utilizing a solution like granulate is a great first step in the same in the sustainability Journey again, you know, our main value proposition to customers has been. Hey, let's lower your costs.

Well, what's great about lowering cost in the aspect that granulate is able to provide is it also lowers the overall carbon footprint and so, you know, we're still in the first inning of a 9 Inning baseball game here in terms of not only the transparency and data and what customers can have access to in terms of their overall footprint, but I think there's some solutions like granulate today that are very actionable and that many customers can take advantage of at least to get started. Andrew Diaz Chief strategy officer of granulate. Thank you so much for joining us.

This was very informative conversation and we and techstrong TV enjoyed it. Thank you so much for your time. All right.

Thank you, Bonnie. All right, stay with us. We're gonna have a lot more after this.