01732 759725
COMPANY PROFILE
34
Preparing for the future
You may know PNY for its USB sticks
and flash drives, but there is much more
to the company than that, including a
long-standing partnership with NVIDIA.
Technology Reseller
finds out more
from Laurent Chapoulaud, PNY’s senior
manager for EMEA.
manager for EMEA, told
Technology
Reseller
that these programmes are
becoming increasingly important as
customers use NVIDIA technologies for
ever more complex applications.
“At the moment, there’s a really big
push on virtualisation. We are offering
the possibility to virtualise graphics
applications like the ones used in
manufacturing or architecture. In the past,
these applications were really limited to
the workstation. Now, we are able to put
this graphics power into remote rooms, into
servers, and to virtualise the solution for
end users. With the NVIDIA Grid solution,
an architect using Revit or another really
powerful, graphics-consuming application
can virtualise the solution, so they can
have different architects working in one
server, working in different locations,
sharing their resources. That’s a really big
push for us,” he said.
Another area of growing interest cited
by Chapoulaud is Artificial Intelligence
and machine learning. “We have specific
appliances like the DGX 1, which is a
server specifically designed for deep
learning that big companies can use in
their research centres. Once you have
trained your neural network on DGX 1, you
can use different appliances in inference
mode. You can have a solution end-to-end,
from deep learning via neural networks to
inferencing the final application,” he said.
Chapouland said that to sell this
level of solution, resellers need to be
fully trained and that to meet their needs
both PNY and NVIDIA have developed
comprehensive channel support
programmes – the NVIDIA Partner Network
(NPN) and the PNY Partner Portal (PPP).
“These solutions are really innovative,
so we want to make sure that our
resellers have all the information they
need to sell them – the content and
training and knowledge. We have these
two programmes running in parallel,
one pushed by NVIDIA, which is focused
more on training and self-certification by
resellers, and one from us, which is more
sales-oriented,” he said.
PNY currently has about 900 resellers
in the UK, including 20 Gold partners.
It is not looking to recruit new resellers,
but rather to maximise the knowledge
and expertise of existing ones so that
they can sell and promote NVIDIA’s new
technologies.
Growing demand
In the meantime, Chapouland says there
continues to be growing demand for
NVIDIA’s new Quadro solutions, mostly
from system builders, and for virtualisation.
“Customers are looking for more
powerful solutions. That’s why we are
launching new Quadro cards, which
provide ever more powerful performance
– to meet the needs of end users who
are choosing more and more demanding
applications like 3ds Max, Maya or
AutoCAD. People want more and more
performance,” he said.
“There is also an expectation that the
market will move more towards virtualised
solutions. People are trying to see how
they can virtualise their solutions and
that’s a key challenge at the moment.
That’s why we provide remote access to
a server that will allow people to do their
own testing to see if virtualising their
solution can be supported.”
Compared to these areas, it is still
early days for NVIDIA’s AI products. Interest
today mainly comes from research centres
and start-ups working in fields such as
image recognition and voice recognition,
but through its, and NVIDIA’s, reseller
programmes, PNY is preparing its reseller
network for the opportunities the future is
bound to bring.
Established in 1985, PNY is a global
manufacturer and supplier of consumer
and business-grade electronics, from
graphics cards, PC memory upgrades,
USB flash drives and solid state disks
to the most powerful NVIDIA embedded
GPU solutions used in machine learning
and AI applications.
There are three distinct parts to PNY:
a B2C unit selling consumer products
direct to the end user through retailers and
e-tailers; a professional solutions arm, PNY
Pro, which markets professional solutions
including PNY servers; and a B2B business
unit that acts as a distributor for NVIDIA
graphics cards and virtualisation software.
PNY has had a partnership with NVIDIA
since 2001. NVIDIA sells its graphics
cards directly to Tier 1 OEMs, HP, Dell
and Lenovo, but has given PNY exclusive
distribution rights for all of its channel
sales in EMEA and the US.
Under this agreement, PNY sells a full
range of NVIDIA products to resellers and
local system builders through wholesalers
and value added distributors such as
Exertis, Ingram and Tech Data.
This includes its latest, most powerful
and most advanced solutions, including
NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards, NVIDIA
Tesla GPUs, NVIDIA Grid virtualisation
software and specific appliances like the
DGX 1 server that NVIDIA has developed
for AI and deep learning applications.
While PNY doesn’t sell directly to
resellers, both it and NVIDIA have support
programmes in place to provide the
channel with pre- and post-sales support
including events management and a range
of sales and marketing tools.
Laurent Chapoulaud, PNY senior
At the moment,
there’s a really
big push on
virtualisation.
We are offering
the possibility
to virtualise
graphics
applications like
the ones used in
manufacturing
or architecture.
