|
Interview
Seated around the table
with Mr. Charles Liang were the
following key corporate staff; Wally
Liaw, V.P. of Sales International; Don
Clegg, V.P. of Marketing & Worldwide
Business Development; Tau Leng, G.M.,
Corporate Marketing & HPC Solutions; and
Dev Tyagi, General Manager of Supermicro
UK.
We were therefore seated
with some of Supermicro's most powerful
and knowledgeable members of staff.
Charles, our thanks
indeed for sitting down today with us
and spending some time explaining a bit
about you, the company, and up and
coming events within the next few
quarters. You have obviously had a good
time to look at the prepared questions
we purposed and prepared for you a few
weeks ago.
Yes indeed I
did see them arriving
We sat
down long and hard having a good think
of what to ask, what not to ask. What
we have prepared for you are a very fair
set of questions for today.
Charles, you and the company are
extremely well written about, though for
today’s readership would you please mind
giving us a bit of background to you and
the company today.
I was a very dedicated
engineer 30 years ago no maybe about 33
years ago where I started to design lots
of different things whilst I was in
university. I also have some patents
from my time in university. So,
primarily its medical
expert
systems
that really interested me
and that’s why I moved to the United
States. This would allow me to start
my medical exposition dream using
artificial intelligence technology to
help doctors diagnose patients’ medical
problems. I had to sit down, figure
out the baseline medicine. That was my
dream for coming to the United States.
If you could be as so
kind; what would be a brief sample of a
day in the life of
Charles Liang
at work.
Most of the time when I wake up is a
product going through my mind, which
product can be better and which can we
improve. This is the beginning of my
day, and I start from there. Then I get
into the office; have meetings with our
engineering teams and sales teams,
talking about what kind of engineering
architecture is more helpful for
customers and the sales strategy,
etc. The whole day can be like this
and ending so.
You need
to excuse my laptop bringing in a
competitors item. Why as a company do
you not produce workstation laptops
yet?
You know we focus on our
servers and storage products these last
10 years and this market is so big.
It’s about USD $50 Billion marketplace
and today our market share is about USD
$500 - $600 million. So, we have big
room to grow. So I therefore believe we
will continue focus on the server and
storage especially in HPC, data centres,
and high-end workstations. And yes,
someday we may design something like a
personal digital system. It can be
something like a notebook but much more
powerful than a notebook, including cell
phone
and camera functions.
Mostly important to me is a Personal
Health innovation with sensors for the
medical expert systems some sort of
medical digital system built into the
personal digital system. That still is
one of the most aggressive dreams I
would like to carry out.
What has
been your previous history prior to the
formation of Supermicro and obviously
how relevant is this massive sector of
the industry
Before Supermicro, I designed a chipsets
for the industry and I designed for
Chips and Technology. I was a systems
design engineer for another company in
the Bay Area as well.
You will
have seen the industry change over these
16 years, what do you think has been the
key influencing factor that has
continued to make Supermicro a success
today.
I believe it’s been the pace at which
the technology has changed and because
of the competition and because of the
demands. Some people want more
powerful performance machines like a
servers or workstations and they now
like to pay less than before, with
better performance and power savings.
One of Supermicro’s strengths is quick
to market. Whenever there is new
technology available from Intel, AMD or
others, we are able to take and make
this new technology into a finished
platform for the market, for the
end-user, and this faster turn around
time allowed us to grow our business.
The move
from a wholly private company to a
listing on the NASDAQ, this must have
been an exciting time for you all. Has
this strategy paid off? Was there much
capital investment into the company for
this transition?
Yes, for sure the company
has continued to grow. We liked to go
public so to improve our brand name and
recognition worldwide and that I believe
will help our product promotion.
However, to make a company public we
paid lots of effort just to prepare for
IPO to help us go public, firmly
establish our brand name, and give lots
of confidence to the corporate
customers. We spent 3 years to
establish the company to be an IPO
company.
Yes I feel we are much
stronger than before. Supermicro you
know was traditionally an engineering
company so we are very strong in
engineering and yes it had been our
weaknesses in sales and marketing and
that’s why now we are aggressively
growing our sales and marketing team.
That’s why we have the confidence to
grow with our sales and marketing.
With the
company being so firmly established
globally within the community, how has
this current economic climate affected
you as a company as currently your share
price is fluctuating (much like others),
do you see the new Nehalem EP platform
being the key success factor to recovery
for the company? Do you also foresee
many companies falling by the wayside
from this current economic downturn?
Yes the poor economy has triggered
customers to be more careful to evaluate
which product from which company will
best benefit them. Many businesses will
benefit and Supermicro, we feel, has the
best products and gain more chance in
this poor economic period. Again before
in every 2 years Intel had new
technology with new CPUs and Chipsets.
This time it took Intel 3 years to get
things ready. Last time 2 years with
Woodcrest et al back in 2006 and
now in 2009 we are ready with Nehalem
with a much bigger technology change.
So we see a big change with the energy
of three years and now the people want
the new technology with the Nehalem
product line. I would like to say with
the Nehalem line we have never had such
a strong product line in our history.
It has taken us a lot of effort to make
this product line ready and now
everything is ready from the product
launch of March 30th. So we believe
the next few quarters will be nice
quarters for us. Good in revenue and
profitability.
Moving
on from Intel's Nehalem technology we
also are about to see the advent of
AMD's Istanbul and Shanghai CPUs. Do
you foresee this as a threat at all to
Intel or should we never under-estimate
Intel and what is to come next.
You know, Nehalem now supports the QPI
interface with the DDR3, 3 channel per
CPU with DP it will be 6 channel memory
bandwidth. Much better memory bandwidth
and much better I/O performance and of
course its virtualisation features and
its power saving facilities we have a
very strong demand. And of course
with the products from AMD, we have both
product lines ready. We also have a
very strong Shanghai and Istanbul
products ready here. So to us,
whatever the customer needs we have a
good product ready.
There is
a new vogue phrase "flight for quality"
doing the rounds in many areas. Of our
own experience with Supermicro products
this has been exceptional, how does the
company strive to maintain such a high
tight quality control assessment of its
products.
Within Supermicro we have a very good
company culture. Most of our employees
keep with Intel for a long time. (Ops
a somewhat fraudulent slip). Sorry,
keep with Supermicro for a long time and
the culture is to continually improve
and keep our employees for a long time.
I believe our quality of standards will
continue to improve. Most of our
original employees are still here and we
are continuing to employ many more
employees. Within the last 6 months we
have slowly built our employee base.
We
noticed from the company’s website a
good few vacancies for marketing, sales
and engineers so this is a very good
true sign of growth within the company.
After the Nehalem launch I personally
did see a very strong demand here and we
continued growing our R & D capability
here. For example a 3D Graphics
optimised system and a co-GPU optimised
system. A 1U to support 2 GPUs and a 4U
to support a 4 GPU system and truly
optimised it for performance. Most
importantly performance per watt and
also improve the reliability. Therefore
the architecture optimised for GPU
computing will be available for
production within a month or so.
Supermicro has always been a strong
hardware company but for the last 7
years built our software team to develop
more and more software modules. Soon our
first cluster and data centre management
software should be available. |
