William McCormick
Marshall Choy, senior vice president of product for SambaNova Systems, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding the values of the company that drives its success in such a competitive market and the work that U.S. service branches are doing to ensure our warfighters have the tools and capabilities they need to protect our national security interests during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.
“Traditionally, we’re given the opportunity to experience one or even two significant technology transitions in a lifetime. Since the dawn of the internet, however, there have been massive transitions every decade. In particular, the internet had a huge impact on the public sector and the federal landscape.”
You can read the full interview with Marshall Choy below.
ExecutiveBiz: What are the core values that are important to the company culture at SambaNova Systems? How has your team developed its workflow and ability to drive success in such a competitive market?
Marshall Choy: “The core values that SambaNova embodies are innovation and contributing to a results-driven organization. Our focus is not tied to innovation for the sake of innovating but innovating for the sake of providing real value for our end users, which stems from technology development to go-to-market strategy and more.
Our culture has been built on collaboration, both internally and from a development process perspective. More importantly, that culture gets personified in how we deal with our partners as well as our customers and end users.
We consider our customers to be our partners because we view them as equal parties in a long-term relationship to build and deliver solutions. That has been very clearly demonstrated in the federal landscape through our formerly announced partnerships with the Department of Energy, which has yielded great results.
One great example of this focus at SambaNova Systems is our partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to build up our AI-accelerated supercomputing resources for different types of things like physics and medical work.
The pandemic presented us an opportunity to partner with the DOE and provide those supercomputing AI-driven resources to be part of the global fight against COVID-19 and other threats.
That’s really the core of our company culture at SambaNova. We have a results-oriented approach with an equally fast-moving innovative culture. One of the things we’ve seen is that we are great at attracting talent that has significant, relevant expertise for what the federal government is working to overcome.”
ExecutiveBiz: As military priority continues to be influenced by IT modernization and other initiatives, what do you believe are the most significant capabilities that are being developed for the Army, Navy, etc. to ensure our warfighters have the optimal tools they need to protect themselves and our nation’s national security interests?
Marshall Choy: “SambaNova Systems has customers across many different segments. For us, the public sector including federal, defense and intelligence spaces have been important since our inception. We also have a number of customers in the commercial sector such as banking, financial services as well as manufacturing and healthcare.
The common thing that we’re seeing is the need to gain competitiveness very quickly. This is especially true in the DoD segment, where our customers have become incredibly adept at collecting massive amounts of unstructured data from a variety of sources.
That ability to collect data has vastly outgrown their ability to interpret it, understand it, and translate it to better decisions. All that data is ultimately there to better enable our warfighters and operators.
SambaNova Systems provides capabilities that conventional CPU and GPU systems simply weren’t engineered to accommodate. For example, our platform can use full-resolution imagery for computer vision analysis providing improved insights, or extremely large language models for greater accuracy.
SambaNova uniquely optimizes data computations, memory, and communications resulting in higher performance at optimal efficiency across models of all sizes and forms, and for any batch size.
This focus on removing limitations in the data computation is going to be the key to providing users with the greatest value from available data, and ultimately unleashing the true capability of our warfighters.”
About Marshall Choy
Marshall Choy is Vice President of Product at SambaNova Systems, responsible for product management and go to market. Choy brings extensive experience leading global organizations to bring breakthrough products to market, establish new market presences, and grow new and existing lines of business.
Choy was previously vice president of Product Management at Oracle until 2018. Choy was responsible for the portfolio and strategy for Oracle Systems products and solutions. He led teams that help deliver comprehensive end-to-end hardware and software solutions and product management operations.
Prior to joining Oracle in 2010 when it acquired Sun Microsystems, Choy served as Director of Engineered Solutions at Sun. During his 11 years there, Choy held various positions in development, information technology, and marketing.
