These Are The Top 10 Nvidia Partners Driving AI Adoption
by Dylan Martin
Nvidia has named 10 partners as the cream of the crop in the Americas for their investments in driving adoption of Nvidia-based GPU solutions for artificial intelligence.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced the winners of its 2019 Nvidia Partner Network Partner of the Year awards Friday, recognizing Americas partners that have not just driven meaningful revenue for the chipmaker but have also made big investments in Nvidia's AI playbook.
Craig Weinstein, vice president of Nvidia's Americas partner organization, told CRN that the 10 top Nvidia partners, who cover a variety of industries and specialties, are "bringing transformational impact in AI and expanding our footprint and their own footprint in those industries."
"These award winners are bringing remarkable drive and expertise to advancing the industry that they're in," he said. "And they're delivering practical value to customers across the globe in the process. One thing that we're noticing is that collective contributions of these partners are foundational to our success as a company."
Many of the AI projects driven by the top 10 Nvidia partners have successfully transitioned from proofs of concept to commercial deployments, according to Weinstein. But while the revenue partners brought in for Nvidia was one consideration for the Partner of the Year awards, the executive said the biggest impact came from their investments in product enablement, marketing, demand generation, software, hardware expertise and relationships with independent software developers.
"When you combine all that together in combination with the hardware and the software, what you're seeing is a full architectural approach from these NPN partners, and then they're able to deliver to those customers in those industries full-stack AI solutions that are ready for real-time deployment," he said.
Eliot Eshelman, an executive at Microway, one of the 2019 NPN winners, said Nvidia has become a key partner for the high-performance computing system integrator and that its GPUs along with its Mellanox interconnect technologies have become increasingly prevalent in deployments.
"We're seeing a lot of interest and a lot of movement on Nvidia's products, in the DGX in particular," said Eshelman, referring to Nvidia's purpose-built DGX systems for deep learning workloads.
Eshelman said Nvidia's strengths aren't just in hardware but also in software as well as subject matter expertise across several areas.
"They've got PhDs that focused on particular applications or specific research avenues, but they also have a big software team," he said. "So for certainly all of the common deep learning applications and many of the common HPC applications, they offer pre-optimized containers. And that's another place where they're seeing success. When you buy into an Nvidia solution, you aren't just getting the hardware, you're getting software stack as well. You turn it on, and it's got all of that that optimized software from their [Nvidia GPU Cloud] hub."
The following are Nvidia's 2019 Nvidia Partner Network Partner of the Year award winners in the Americas, with descriptions provided by the company: