The interview
Q: What is your name?
I'm Eric Baissus, the CEO of the French company Kalray since 2014.
Q: What is your product?
Kalray is a next-generation "smart" processor and semiconductor company that addresses a new global need: instantaneous analysis of huge amounts of data, which is immediately put to use. In the increasingly connected and fast-paced world we live in, this kind of technology is becoming absolutely essential.
Two areas of application for us are autonomous cars and smart cities. The development of autonomous cars, on which a large number of sensors (cameras, radars, etc.) are installed, recording, analysing and processing all the relevant data in real time (e.g. pedestrian, object on the road) to decide or help make a decision quickly to avoid a danger, are absolutely necessary before this new type of vehicle is put on the streets. Similarly for smart cities, the images from the cameras that are increasingly present in the city need to be analysed instantly in order to react very quickly if a danger such as fires, accidents, aggressions, etc. are spotted. This huge amount of data needs to be analysed in real time and the relevant information selected as quickly as possible, in order to respond to emergencies as quickly as possible. Our products prodive the hardware to do this.
Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?
We do hardware.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
Kalray's product is the result of a decade of cutting-edge research and development, which makes us a leader in our market today. Big foreign companies do not have a similar level of knowledge and experience in our product area but remain nevertheless competitive because they can improve their "old" existing technologies to provide a similar level of product. There is also a recent wave of start-ups from the US, China and Israel in particular in our domain, but they all so far seem to be able to compete with Kalray.
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
We are using using open source technologies as much as possible and in doing so differentiate ourselves from our main competitor, Nvidia, whose ecosystem is based on proprietary licenses, and which is three times less powerful and much more expensive than our solution built in France.
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
Kalray is working with a number of manufacturers such as Orange, Renault and Dell, as well as CleverCloud, Scaleway and OVH, which use Kalray's DPU (Data Processing Unit) processors and software solutions for data storage and management.