Bringing Mainstream Accelerated Computing to Remote Workers

This is a Q&A with NVIDIA’s Michael Kaplan, Director Global Business Development.

Welcome Michael! Can you share what your role with NVIDIA is and how long you have been with the company? 

Thank you, Stephen.  My name is Michael Kaplan, I’m responsible for business development globally for NVIDIA, specific to our M&E business and I’ve been with NVIDIA for ten years now. 

Teradici and NVIDIA have collaborated in a number of ways over the years including integration of NVIDIA NVENC encoding into PCoIP Ultra features and now you’ve just released some exciting news for the EGX platform and accelerated computing that could have an impact on our mutual customers. Can you give us a brief overview of what’s new?

Yes, actually, there’s a lot of exciting updates coming out of NVIDIA's GTC this week, our conference that is running virtually April 12 to 16.  Our new NVIDIA EGX™ platform is one of the announcements – a platform that provides a way for customers to run both traditional and modern applications on a single high-performance, scalable infrastructure.

EGX brings together GPUs for compute and graphics acceleration, high-speed secure networking, and enterprise-grade management to help our customers across many industries be more productive in their day-to-day.

EGX is designed to help customers accelerate both AI and traditional enterprise workloads that include data center AI training and inference, data analytics and machine learning, professional visualization, remote collaboration and more. It’s the last two types of workloads that will be especially interesting for customers of Teradici.  

What does accelerated graphics really mean?

When we talk about accelerated graphics we’re talking about the world of visualization applications and how these can be improved with professional graphics performance of EGX. When artists in media and entertainment are creating 3D models for a movie or an architect is working with photorealistic visualization of a building complex, they are engaging in interactive, graphics-intensive applications that work better with powerful GPU support.

And as you probably know, the expectations for faster development and improved accuracy and realism are increasing all the time. EGX brings the GPUs and additional technologies to help improve these complex workflows.  

Raising the bar on productivity and performance is an ongoing challenge. Can you tell us a bit more about what that really means to your customers?

Creative professionals and engineers are solving increasingly complex problems, and the challenges they face are compounded with globally distributed teams working remotely. To drive visual computing workflows, professionals require incredibly powerful computing solutions that support the latest technologies and are capable of powering diverse applications and multiple workloads from the data center.

Additionally, customers need the ability to work efficiently and securely from outside the office -supporting the growing work-from-home workforce is critical to the success of almost every business.  

So that’s important to many of Teradici’s customers as well. How do you see Teradici and NVIDIA working together?

Our technologies have incredible synergies – NVIDIA technology brings features like real-time ray tracing and AI-enhanced graphics to virtual workstations, capable of running the most demanding visualization workflows – and then Teradici Cloud Access Software enables these customers to enjoy that powerful workstation experience from anywhere.

They could be working from home and be just as productive as if they are in the office.  Teradici CAS also ensures our professional visualization customers keep their valuable IP secure, while freeing them up to work wherever they need to.   

What about remote collaboration? How important is that in the context of the EGX platform?

The impact of COVID-19 has made remote collaboration a necessity, and we see this new landscape of work continuing in the future. We can already foresee how we’ll split our working week between the home office and the head office going forward and it’s no different for our professional visualization customers. These types of users collaborate on complex 3D assets while using multiple software applications.

NVIDIA recently launched NVIDIA Omniverse™, an open platform for virtual collaboration and real-time physically-accurate simulation, where creators, designers, and engineers can collaborate in real time for enhanced creativity and productivity. Using Teradici CAS, these designers can securely connect to the Omniverse collaborative platform to complete their work remotely with the performance they need, whether as individual creators or at enterprise scale. 

We have a separate blog on Omniverse – check it out for more details.   

What do you think is next in this space and why?

That’s an interesting question.  If we’re talking about collaboration, I think we’ll see tremendous innovation; as organizations leverage technology to enable collaboration across different types of roles within an organization, across different types of systems and across geographies.  It’s something to stay in tune with over this year as the pace of change is fast. 

What parting comments would you have for Teradici’s blog readers?

There is so much to learn in the design and visualization space – and you can catch it all through GTC.  It’s free to register, and sessions will be available on-demand after the event.