 From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Supercomputing 17, brought to you by Intel. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Denver, Colorado, Supercomputing 2017. It's all things heavy lifting, big iron, 12,000 people. I think it's the 20th anniversary of the conference. A lot of academics really talking about big iron doing big computing. And we're excited to have our next guest talking about speed. Stefan Monboise, I get that right. He's the director of marketing and partnerships for SLIs. Welcome. Thank you. So for folks that aren't familiar with SLIs, give them kind of the quick overview. Okay, so SLIs is a French startup. Actually, a spin-off of a company called PLDA has been around for 20 years doing PCI Express IP. And about a few years ago, we started an initiative to basically bring FPGA acceleration to the cloud industry. So what we say is we basically enable FPGA acceleration as a service. So did it not exist in cloud service providers before that, or what was kind of the opportunity that you saw there? So FPGAs have been used in data centers in many different ways. Right. They're starting to make their way into as a service type of approach. But one of the things that the industry, one of the buzzwords that the industry is using is FPGA as a service. And the industry usually refers to it as the way to bring FPGA to the end users. But when you think about it, end users don't really want FPGA as a service. Most of the cloud end users are not FPGA experts. So they couldn't care less whether it's an FPGA or something else. What they really want is the acceleration benefit. Right. Hence the term FPGA acceleration as a service. So in order to do that, instead of just going and offering an FPGA platform and giving them the tools, even if they are easy to use and develop the FPGAs, our objective is to propose, to provide a marketplace of accelerators that they can use as a service without even thinking that it's an FPGA on the background. So that's a really interesting concept because it also leverages an ecosystem. And one thing we know that's important if you have any kind of a platform play, you need an ecosystem that brings a much broader breadth of applications and solution suites. There's a lot of talk about solutions. So that was pretty insightful because now you open it up to this much broader a set of applications. Well, absolutely. The ecosystem is the essential part of the offering because obviously as a company, we cannot be expert in every single domain. Right. And to a certain extent, even FPGA designers, they are what? About maybe 10, 15,000 FPGA designers in the world. They're not really expert in the end application. So one of the challenges that we're trying to address is how do we make application developers, the people who are already playing in the cloud, the ISVs for example, who have the expertise of what the end user wants, being able to develop something that is efficient to the end user in FPGAs. And this is why we've created a tool called Quick Play which basically enables what we call the accelerator function developers, the guys who have the application expertise to leverage an ecosystem of IP providers in the FPGA space that have built efficient building blocks like encryption, compression, video transcoding, these sort of things. So what you have is an ecosystem of cloud service providers. You have an ecosystem of IP providers and we have this growing ecosystem of accelerator developers that develop all these accelerators that are sold as a service. And that really opens up the number of people that are qualified to play in the space because you're kind of hiding the complexity into the hardcore hardware engineers and really making it more kind of a traditional software application space, is that right? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And we're doing that on the technical front but we're also doing that on the business model front. Because one thing with FPGAs is that FPGAs has relied heavily over the years on the IP industry. And the IP industry for FPGAs, and it's the same for ASICs, have been also relying on the business model which is based on very high upfront cost. So let me give you an example. Let's say I want to develop an accelerator, right? For database. And what I need to do is to get the stream of data coming in. It's most likely encrypted. So I need to decrypt this data. Then I want to do some search algorithm on it to extract certain functions. I'm going to do some processing on it. And maybe the last thing I want to do is I want to compress because I want to store the result of that data. If I'm doing that with a traditional IP business model, what I need to do is basically go and talk to every single one of those IP providers. And ask them to sell me the IP. In the traditional IP business model, I'm looking at somewhere between 200,000 to 500,000 upfront cost. And I want to sell this accelerator for maybe a couple of dollars on one of the marketplace. There's something that doesn't play out. So what we've done also is we've introduced a paper-use business model that allows us to track those IPs that are being used by the accelerators so we can propagate the other service business model throughout the industry, the supply chain. Which is huge, right? Because as much as cloud is about flexibility and extensibility, it's about the business model as well, about paying what you use when you use it, turning it on, turning it off. So that's a pretty critical success factor. Absolutely. I mean, you can imagine that there's, I don't know, millions of users in the cloud. There's maybe hundreds of thousands of different type of ways they're processing their data. So we also need a very agile ecosystem that can develop very quickly. And we also need them to do it in a way that doesn't cost too much money, right? Think about it and think about the app store when it was launched, right? When Apple launched the iPhone back about 10 years ago, right? They didn't have much application and they didn't, I don't think they quite knew exactly how it was going to be used. But what they did, which completely changed the industry, is they opened up the SDK that they sold for a very small amount of money and enabled a huge community to come up with a lot of application. And now you go there and you can find an application that really meets your needs. That's kind of the similar concept that we're trying to develop here. So how's been the uptake? I mean, where are you kind of in the life cycle of this project? Is a relatively new spin out of the larger company? Yes. So it's relatively new. We did the spin out because we really want to give that product its own life, right? But we are still at the beginning. So we've started developing partnership with cloud service providers. The two ones that we've announced is Amazon Web Services and OVH, a cloud service provider in France. And we have recruited, I think, about a dozen IP partners. And now we're also working with accelerator developer, accelerator functions developers. So it's a work in progress. And our main goal right now is really to evangelize and to show them how much money they can do and how they can serve this market of acceleration, FPGA acceleration as a service. The cloud providers or the application providers? Who do you have to really convince the most? So the one we have to convince today are really the application developers. Because without content, your marketplace doesn't mean much. This is the main thing we're focusing on right now. Okay, great. So 2017 is coming to an end, which is hard to believe. So as you look forward to 2018, of those things you just outlined, kind of what are some of the top priorities for 2018? So top priorities will be to strengthen our relationship with the key cloud service providers we work with. We have a couple of other discussions ongoing to try to offer a platform on more cloud service providers. We also want to strengthen our relationship with Intel. And we'll continue the evangelization to really onboard all the IP providers and the accelerator developers so that the marketplace becomes filled with valuable accelerators that people can use. And that's going to be a long process, but we are focusing right now on key application space that we know people can leverage in the application. Exciting time. So it's 10 years since the app store launched, I think. So I like acceleration as a service and cloud service providers. It sounds like a terrific opportunity. It is. It is a huge opportunity. Everybody's talking about it. We just need to materialize it now. All right. Well, congratulations. And thanks for taking a couple of minutes out of your day. Oh, thanks for your time. All right. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from Supercomputing 2017. Thanks for watching.