Start-Up Profile: Kaleao

Company
Kaleao Ltd
 
Locations
Corporate HQs in Cambridge, UK, US HQs in Charlotte, NC, offices in Heraklion, Crete, Greece and Padova, Italy, Grenoble, France
 
Date founded
October 2015
 
Financial funding
€4.65 million ($5 million) seed, investors being OPEA, AB Analitica, Private Equity, and founders
 
Revenue
First one expected in May 2017
 
Main executives
 
CEO and co-founder Giampietro Tecchiolli worked from 1987 to 1998 as a researcher in Electronics and Computer Science with INFN and with FBK/IRST (Trento), where he developed architectures and chips for VLSI-friendly machine learning, smart optical sensors and algorithms for machine learning and optimization. From 1999 to 2014 he was with Eurotech S.p.A. as group EVP and group CTO. On behalf of Eurotech he has also covered the positions of president and CEO of EthLAB S.r.l. (Italy), external director of Advanet (Japan), board chairman of Eurotech SA (France), director of Eth Devices S.r.o. (Slovakia), director of Eurotech Ltd (UK) and director of E-Tech USA. In the same period he also worked as professor of computer architecture and parallel architectures at the Universities of Verona, Parma and Udine. From 2011 to 2014, he was also member of the steering board and treasurer of the European technology platform for HPC. He is member of the IEEE Computer Society and author of several publications and patents.
 
CSO and co-founder John Goodacre was co-founder and CTO of C3 an UK company in computer telephony platforms and subsequent transferred to the USA through co-founding an expansion into the call center markets. From 1997 to 2002 was group program manager of the Exchange Real-time Collaboration with Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, WA, USA, defining, architecting and delivering the first generation of enterprise data and video collaboration tools, he later transferred as group program manager to the Wireless Telephony Group Europe with Microsoft Ltd. in Cambridge UK. Since 2002 he has been with ARM Ltd as director of technology and systems. In 2014 he was appointed by University of Manchester as professor of computer architectures within the advanced processor technologies group in the School of Computer Science.
 
CMO, GM and co-founder Greg Nicoloso was from 2000 to 2006 with SIM2 Multimedia, an Italian consumer and professional electronics company as a marketing and operations manager for their US operations. Prior to being relocated in the US, he was in charge of marketing management for most of the European and North & Latin American countries. In 2006 he moved to the Eurotech Group where he held two positions in US, one as president, CEO and COB of Eurotech Inc. based in Maryland and one as president of Dynatem Inc. in California.
 
VP sales Michael Duhamel draws upon his 25 years of experience engineering, marketing, developing new business and selling multi-million dollar, complex solutions for a range of distributed, embedded and cloud computing applications across several vertical markets. He started his career with L.F.E. (Mark IV) engineering distributed and embedded computer based systems for the traffic control and manufacturing process industries and with Zymark (SOTAX) for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and defense industries. Later he joined PRI/Brooks Automation in the marketing, business development and technical sales of fab wide material control systems for semiconductor electronics. In 2005, he joined Applied Data Systems/Eurotech as a regional sales manager. After having grown his territory sales by 400% over of a several year period, he was promoted to VP sales for North America.
 
VP of R&D Paul Arts started his career in Philips R&D in 1994 where he climbed up the company ladder to become a manager of large multi-million projects. He then moved to Ericsson in 2000 and progressed his career becoming the head of the multimedia solutions department, which he successfully let for 3 years. In 2010 he joined Eurotech as director of R&D and engineering of the HPC division. In this role, he led the development of the Aurora product line, delivering the first hot liquid cooled supercomputers and the most energy efficiency HPC systems and the world. He also managed large multi-million EU funded exascale projects, delivering mile stone European machines like DEEP, DEEP-ER and QPACE2.
 
VP of operations Paolo Stecca brings more than 30 years of experience in leading multinational design and manufacturing teams across Europe and Asia and covering various procurement senior roles. He was an operational director and material manager in different companies like Telsey, Fraccaro, Radioindustrie and Necsy. Prior to Kaleao, he worked for several years for de Longhi were he was operational director and Asia purchasing manager.
 
Number of employees
35
 
Technology
New generation of enterprise and cloud computing by natively converging computation, storage, networking and virtualization into compact, energy efficient, transparent, integrated hardware and software solutions.

True convergence schemas

Products description
Kaleao KMAX platform uses a hardware-managed approach to elastically create system global resource pools, and a patented ‘physicalization’ approach to rapidly and invisibly allocate a portion of the global resources across required applications. This allows matching high-speed performance with the flexibility and agility of a software-defined infrastructure, increasing the manageability, scalability and performance of the infrastructure with a positive impact on IT productivity.

• Performance density: 1,536 64-bit ARM CPU cores, 370TB of flash storage, 960Gb/s in 3U rackspace and embedded 10/40GbE network switch.

• Energy efficiency: 15W for each 8-core server with 10Gb/s I/O, providing over four time the performance per unit of energy spent.

The KMAX platform is available in two editions, an integrated flexible computing appliance or as an open server KMAX Server Edition combining the ARM technology based 64-bit hardware with fixed storage and network resources partitioned towards a single OS image capable of running Ubuntu Server or Docker based applications.
 
KMAX Appliance Edition is KMAX Server plus the Kaleao converged software stack, provides software-defined hardware capabilities, a preinstalled OpenStack compatible base platform with an integrated orchestration and management suite, including an application service deployment software stack and delivering the complete functionality of an hyperconverged appliance.
 
Released date
October 2016 with early access program in May 2017 and availability in July 2017
 
Price
$700/server
 
Technology partners
Samsung, Xilinx, ARM, Micron, OnApp, Euro Server, HiPEAC
 
System integrators and VARs
AxxonSoft, Network Allies, Tuangru, Genstor, System Fabric Works, ILA-Microserver, CREAplus
 
Distributors and OEMs
CDW, Tech Data, Ingram Micro
 
Number of customers
Hundreds of prospects in the pipeline with about 60 active potentials for 2017. Early Access Program production fully allocated.
 

Applications

• Web and e-commerce: Web hosting, e-commerce and online money processing
• Hyperscale web: Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
• Cloud: IaaS and PaaS services
• Data management: Data mining, business intelligence, analytics, content management and delivery, media streaming, app stores
• Virtualization: VDI, NFV – network function virtualization, ROBO
• Server side IoT: Computation and storage data center enablement of IoT application and platforms, combination of edge and data center computing into a single on-premise system
• Enterprise: Storage, web, printing, email servers, web development
   

Target market
    •    Public and private cloud (cloud services management)
    •    Smart storage (enterprise and cloud hyperscale storage management)
    •    Web infrastructure (e-commerce, web hosting, web services)
    •    IT infrastructure
    •    Telecommunications
    •    Data analytics (data mining, business intelligence, analytics)
    •    Content delivery networks (content and web pages’ storage, replication and delivery)
    •    VMS (video monitoring software)
 
Competitors
There are numerous: all vendors of ARM server, microserver and integrated/converged system vendors, hyperconverged solution and all-flash storage.