Parallel Works Launchs a Major Breakthrough for National Security Computing

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to know another Tech Drunk tv. I'm really excited to introduce you to Matthew Shasti, and I hope I said that right.

Matthew is the co-founder and CEO of Parallel Works. Hey, Matthew, welcome to Text Drunk tv. Alan, how you doing?

Glad to be Here. Glad to have you on Matthew. Matthew, I wanna make sure I Did I pronounce your last name right?

If not correctly. You did, yep. Okay, that was good.

I always like to, you know what, your parents gave you a name and you've got a family name and it, it deserves to be pronounced correctly. That was pretty Good. Yeah.

Cool. So, so Matthew, you're the, uh, co-founder and CEO of Parallel Works. You know, I, I've co-founded a few companies myself.

I, I always like to say, as the founder or co-founder, you kind of breathe life into your creation every day, right? You could have a lot of employees, you could have great employees, you could be working with friends or strangers that you just met. But basically it's your passion that carries the day.

It's your passion that invigorates this company. So give us an idea, where's your passion? Where does it come from?

How did it wind up being at Parallel Works? Yeah, that's great. The, the passion stemmed really early on.

I mean, we, this, we're a 10-year-old company. We've been building this thing for 10 years. It has the same mission as it had the day one and even before when I was working.

It's, it's make, trying to make computing systems easier for people to use. That's kind of the whole goal of what we're doing. Uh, and we're doing that through software.

We try to make, you know, increasingly complex computing architectures and things are now distributed all over the world or country, depending on who you're talking to. And how do you make it easier for the people that actually need to use these things for building machine learning pipelines or, you know, creating, you know, RR and D activities or, you know, uh, translation activities or whatever the workloads may be. How to get it into their hands in an easier way to consume and make them more productive and ultimately innovate faster.

That's what it's all about for, for me personally. Absolutely. You know, I, I had a discussion this morning.

I was doing a podcast called the PO Platform Engineering Show. We talk about platform engineering and, and one of the, and you know, we're talking about why, why do you want platform engineering? Why do you need platform engineering?

Is it just for the cool kids who are doing DevOps and Cloud native? What about, you know, if you're on a highly regulated industry, you're in a data center, you've got a monolithic architecture, do you still need platform? And mm-hmm.

You know, the discussion drifted into it just seems that as time goes by, right? If we have that space time continuum cone, that you always see things grow more complex, right? Mm-hmm.

You could, systems drift, systems grow, you know, state of technology grows, and with all of that, it grows to more complexity, not less complexity. Right? I would agree with that.

Yeah. And, you know, as it, that it, it's like, you know, does the universe eventually just fade into as a result of, you know, uh, continuing to go grow out and they say, you know, the stars go out. D does that complexity, does it ever stop?

Or what, how do we, how do we harness or get ahead of that complexity, right? Because Yeah, I mean, it, I Think that, that's a good question. I mean, from, just from like the, the world that I live in, which is kind of computing infrastructure perspective, 10 years ago, it was much more common for people we talk to organizations that we, we serve and our customers and things to have the monolithic computing environments.

Or they were, you know, just moving into AWS for example. And they were, you know, happy there. And, you know, that that was kind of the status quo at the time.

Monolithic, you know, single data center, single colo, maybe just, you know, a single cloud. And really over even these 10 years, I've watched that transition from those type of environments from a complexity perspective to ones where now they want to connect those with several clouds. And you've seen these hundreds of neo clouds and GPU as a service providers coming online, each with different offerings and different availability and pricing.

Organizations need to bring those in. In many cases, they're buying these new architecture systems, NVIDIA systems, you know, and a and B systems in some cases, all with different interfaces on top of them. Kubernetes moving from virtualized environments to containerization.

I don't see that trend really going away anytime soon. In fact, in fact, I think it's gonna get even more complex when quantum becomes valuable for organizations, which, you know, there's all debating timelines of when that's gonna happen. But I'm just say, Doug, what, where, where do you wanna throw a dart at the board and tell me when you think that happens.

I, I am not going to, no, but sometime in the near future, let's say, there's gonna be definitely applications that there is value there. And similar to how we've seen accelerator systems come, come in line so fast and Enterprise is starting to adopt 'em, that will happen. The complexity will continue to grow.

And so for me, how do I get in front of it? You know, I focus on user experience of the computing systems, right? It's delivering software tools that make it so that the people that are using these things, regardless of the shape of 'em, regardless of the interaction, can get to them easily and productively.

That's kind of, that's how I would say we get ahead of it through kind of user experience and interaction. Excellent. You know, another, I had a recent conversation on this as well.

The whole user experience, uh, is at the heart of things. Look, let me before we jump in further, I, I feel like we didn't do a good job though of telling people, pa the parallel work story. You, you're doing this 10 years trying to make the complex manageable for people.

How does Parallel Works do that? Exactly? Yeah, great.

Great question. So we, yeah, again, 10 years ago we spun out of Argonne National Lab. Mm-hmm.

Actually, and we were, my partner and I created the company as essentially a user interface on top of batch scheduler, supercomputing Systems. That's kind of the world. We, we came from.

I was a engineer, my partner was at Argonne. We, we started building a, a user interface and a piece of software to make it easier to submit jobs, computing jobs on these big, you know, generally building size buildings and the difference in these type of systems, these computing systems, they all work together to solve one problem from a networking and storage perspective. But that's where we, we started Parallel Works, you know, creates a piece of software that aims to connect in wide varieties of computing infrastructure, both architecturally and distance wise, uh, into a single interface.

And once they're all connected in, then you can serve those computing interfaces to your users within an organization. You know, the teams that are actually consuming these things, uh, as a really kind of treating it as a single system because all of the details about how you interact with the systems, whether it's Kubernetes or Bash scheduler systems, or VMware or OpenStack or any of the clouds, we make all those things look and feel the same. So that's kind of the goal of Parallel Works.

We have a, a software tool, um, called Activate. So our actual platform is called Activate. We have a managed SaaS version for commercial side, uh, users.

And then as of three weeks ago, we now have a FedRAMP PI IL five SaaS as well, where specifically DOD defense users and contractors can come into this turnkey managed IL five FedRAMP high environment, click a button, provision resources, and run their export control workload. So mission critical, export control. Um, so that's, that's what we build.

It's this Activate platform. Um, organizations can also take that and put it inside their own cloud or on-prem boundary and do the same thing, connect all the resources together and deliver it to their end user teams. Excellent.

That's a little bit about, about what we do. Yep. Absolutely.

I'm glad. com easy All one word. Very simple.

Yes. Alright. Alright.

The name actually came about 'cause we, when we started right? You're, you're running on these super computing systems that run parallel computing jobs and we kind of played off the parallel parallel works, uh, story for that. Yep.

And you know, now, now kind of as we evolve into this complex world of diverse architectures that are geographically distributed, you know, we like to think of ourselves as a type of distributed operating system, so to speak, for hybrid computing. That's, that's kind of how I position it. People always have different opinions on what does hybrid mean.

And I, I try to define it, but Yeah. You know, so it's funny you mentioned that, right? I always got the hybrid piece.

I, I'm gonna have a little bit in the public cloud a little bit, maybe in my colo center or maybe something in my You got it. Data center closet, whatever. I, I'll be honest with you, I didn't see multi-cloud catching on the way it has in retrospect.

It's easy to see, right? Because each one of these clouds has something they do a little better than the other guy. And, and not just the big three either.

I mean, whether you go into Oracle or IBM or, or some of the ones like these GPU as a services and stuff like that, you know, they all have their own special source. And you know, as I've gotten older, I've learned it's all about having the right tool for the job. And, and so you pick the right tool for you whatever particular job you're doing.

Um mm-hmm. But that being said, you know, then we have this whole other world, Matthew of, of the federal government space, right. You guys recently had some news out in here.

Um, I, I have a background in one of the companies I co-founded was about 65, 60%, maybe more of our business was in the fed space, mostly on the DOD side agencies rather than civilian government, though we did do, did do some of that as well. It's a world unto itself. Yeah.

Yes it is. I talked to us so far. I'm still in the early stages of it, but yeah, Talk to us about your recent news there.

Yeah, sure. So, um, really three years ago we won a competitive solicitation from what's called the Defense Innovation Unit, DIU. And they're, they serve as their transition organization in the DOD to help industry get into the defense sector, really.

And they, what they've done is they've innovated on some contract vehicles really, um, that they call these commercial service offering CSO that makes it more approachable for DOD organizations after you go through one of these to adopt your solution without having to go through like the big primes or the far, you know, far contracts, all that type of thing. Uh, they call it like a follow on authority 'cause it's already been competed. So we won one of those three years ago.

Uh, it was really fun. Part of it was working with some researchers on machine learning image detect, image detection pipelines from essentially satellite imagery that can see through cloud SAR SAR data and detecting objects in that data. And, you know, putting that into our platform, running it on, uh, cloud providers as well as the big on-prem, you know, computing machines, super computing machines.

And that was great and it worked. And, you know, it was, it was fun collaborating with some of those groups and solving real, you know, machine learning challenges. Specifically.

The other part of the, the engagement was bringing our activate software to a, what's called FedRAMP high impact level five authorization. And really what that means, it's the highest classification level before secret. So it's specifically for US citizen export controlled or IAR software and data.

And, you know, we're like, when we started like, oh, sure we can do that. And we didn't really realize the depth that that goes into to get a software solution like ours authorized through all the proper channels, uh, three weeks ago that we had at the conclusion the, you know, the culmination of that three year effort by getting the authorization through the DOD authorizing body called dsa. Sure.

And now what that means is we're open for, you know, this platform, our software is open for business for anybody in the defense industrial base to, you know, apply this tool for their own multi-cloud hybrid computing needs for their defense engagements at that, you know, I a level security and they don't need to go through what we went through is really what it means. Right. And spending all the money The time.

I was just gonna ask you that because I've been through this, right? We had to, we had to, I had to go through an information assurance certification process where there was some, there was some encryption involved. So we had to be FIPs compliant.

Got it. Yep. And, You know, it was, we got information assurance certified in the Army, but then we had some Navy business and some other agencies and it, you know, fa the, the one smart thing we did it, The look on your face is showing Yeah, no.

Is telling That the money, we had to go to one of those labs where they do the certification and Yep. We, we were blessed. They sent me an angel from heaven, this guy named Mike Leman, who had about, Mike had maybe 40 plus years in the federal space.

And so he knew how to navigate. But even with an expert guide like that, much like you, it took us three years. And I'm telling you, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So this, this problem that we're talking about, it's, it's called like the accreditation barrier. Some people call it like a valley of death. Mm-hmm.

And if you ask like Amazon or Google or Azure or other clouds, it's really impeded cloud adoption in the, in the defense sector. And there's definitely a pockets of it going on There is cloud computing. There's these big cloud contracts that let you get cloud accounts easily.

Like I can get an Amazon account in their GovCloud pretty easily with all the defense discounts worked in through things like JWCC and these other contracts. But this accreditation step, you have to go through this process of certifying everything. We're trying to basically remove that.

And there's other groups that are kind of taking angles on that. Palantir, uh, second front have their own angle that kind of own the accreditation barrier. We're trying to do it in a SaaS mode where now anybody can come in and provision these IL five resources through a system like through our system without having to go through that themselves.

So it's a little slightly different angle. That's, that is Scott's work you're doing though. I hope it where, I mean, 'cause you know, you hear the stories about the thousand dollar toilet or whatever the heck it is, right?

Or the have to hammer it. It's not that the hammer itself costs that much, it's all of these other accreditation and that This is the several million dollar hammer Yeah. To basically prove to actually, you know, you have to implement all the controls to show that you're secure and then you gotta prove it to a bunch of people.

And that that's the hand, that's what brings the cost To the hammer. Like that's the space. That's the old story about the plumber who fixed the pipe by just bang, he hit, hits the pipe one time with a monkey wrench, boom.

And the water starts flowing and the, he tells the lady, Hey, $250, he said $250, all you did was bang the ranch on the pipe. He said, no, no, that was free. It was knowing where to bang the wrench on the pipe.

There you go. That's 250 bucks. That's exactly like that.

Yeah. So it, there there is that, let me ask you a question though, Matthew. And you know, as a co-founder of a company, as I said, went through this, my, my my in retrospect and hindsight's always 2020, right?

How do you stop it from eating you up? Like where that becomes the focus of your whole company and you forget that, hey, I've got a business that's 10 years old with real customers who pay us real money and I owe it to them to keep keeping on. Totally.

A hundred percent. And we're, you know, we're a team of like 28 people now or so or so. We're fairly small and cashflow profitable.

We're not institutional backed. So it's, you know, we gotta, we have to keep bringing money, money in the bank to pay the bills. Yeah.

Right? I mean that's kind of how we're operating. And it is a good point 'cause it becomes an all intensive thing or a can.

And we've had to be, we were, we were fortunate with some of our DOD sponsors to, to cost share a big aspect of it. So they provide some funding and it's like NRE funding non-recurring to help us achieve some of these goals. And those are just starting to convert now into more of our recurring subscription model.

And we got a a, a big demand after it. But yeah, I mean, you said it right. We gotta kind of focus our attention in our other engagements in Fed Side and in the enterprise side.

And that's kind of where we focus and make, make sure they're very happy while like this DOD what we think is a behemoth of business opportunity for us makes it, makes its way through. 'cause it's a, it's a long tail for sure. Yep.

But you know, as I said, it's a worthy goal and, and it's, and quite frankly, look, you know, we've talked about Doge and everything that goes on in the Fed space, and I'm not here to, to get political with it, but this is something we really need. Forget just firing people randomly and shutting stuff down, you know, to cut money. We need to make it easier for companies to do business with the government and for the government not to have to pay a million bucks for the hammer.

You got it. Exactly. We are, and we, and we've been talking to a lot of startups and other groups that need to go through this accreditation process, but they don't wanna really spend two, you know, whatever x million dollars and, you know, two, three years to go through it.

They can work inside of our boundary, deploy their software, and now they're accredited and they could roll this out to the, you know, so that, that is the idea that we're trying to kind of, uh, bring out. com. com?

We have a contact form you can reach out there. com, so pretty straightforward. I'm sure that my name will be here Somewhere.

Yeah, no, it's on the bottom. Third people are seeing it. Yeah, we have an info at Great.

Okay. I am not seeing that, but we have an info at Parallel Works, so any of those ways we, you know, get in touch with us, we can definitely have a, a more in depth discussion. All Right.

Hey Matthew, I appreciate you coming on Text Drunk TV today. Good luck with this. I, you know, I've been there.

I will tell you, you know, people are always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I don't know if it's a pot of gold, but there is success at the end of the rainbow when you get to the other side of this. So, um, Exactly.

Yeah. And that's why in the meantime we'll be, we'll be busy with, you know, our other engagements. Another second.

Absolutely. Matt, Matthew Sha Thanks for having me, Alan. Thank you.

Matthew Shas did co-founder CEO Parallel works here on Tech Drunk tv. We'll be back in a minute.