COVER STORY
While Lambda’s system business was profitable, the company had been working on a more ambitious project: a GPU cloud service.After initially building out a service using its own cash, the company went into expansion mode in 2021 and started raising tens of millions of dollars from venture capital firms to compete with AWS and other cloud providers on price. Now that the generativeAI craze has kicked into full gear,Agar- wal said Lambda has been struggling to keep up with demand for cloud instances powered by Nvidia’s A100 and H100 GPUs due to a broader shortage of components in the industry. “I think there is going to be massive growth, especially within the AI infrastructure offering layer. I think everyone today is underestimating the amount of compute needed,” he said. Building The Teams To Seize The Services Dream Mark III’s Lin said there was no grand vision behind the com- pany’s decision to start an AI practice. Instead, it started with a
What has also made Mark III stand out are the hackathons and education sessions held by the company to help customers understand what they can achieve with AI systems. “Hackathons are great because we can assemble self-forming teams from all across that [customer’s] community, whether it be a large enterprise, a large university, a large academic medical center, and work specifically together on different challenges,” Lin said. For Insight Enterprises, acquisitions have been one way the Chandler, Ariz.-based solution provider powerhouse has been able to build teams with AI and data expertise, according to Carmen Taglienti, a principal cloud and AI architect at the com- pany. Acquisitions that have strengthened Insight’s talent in this area include PCM, BlueMetal and Cardinal Solutions. This has helped Insight build a fast-growingAI business, which includes selling and integrating systems like Nvidia’s DGX plat- form with software as well as building custom solutions.
young employee who had tinkered with a project over a weekend. “What happened is a 23-year-old developer had walked in one day and built a computer vision model in 2015 using TensorFlow and was like, ‘Is this pretty cool?’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty cool,’” said Lin.
While Nvidia has been a key partner for Insight, the company has also relied on partnerships with specialist ISVs to win large AI customer deals in areas like retail. “It really helps to sim- plify this problem of how am I going to effectively leverage AI techniques and the models that allow
‘[Partnering with specialist ISVs] really helps to simplify the problem of how am I going to e ectively leverage AI techniques and the models that allow us
to do something practical with it.’ — Carmen Taglienti, Principal Cloud, AI Architect, Insight Enterprises
From there, Mark III knew it had to start an AI practice, and that individual act of creation went on to become a core tenet— build something every day—which Lin said has resulted in high revenue growth, largely driven by health-care and life sciences customers. This builder mentality means that the company’sAI team—which now includes systems engineers, developers, DevOps professionals and data scientists—is intimately familiar with all the software and hardware underpinnings to make AI applications work. “The reason why we’re successful essentially is that since we built every day for the last seven, eight years, we really under- stand how these stacks are constructed,” he said. For Mark III and other solution providers, the hiring of special- ists who know their way around AI software and hardware has been key to opening new services opportunities. The company’s biggest profit centers are rollout services, which involve setting up systems and on-boarding users onto the sys- tem, and what it calls “co-pilot” services, which give a customer direct access to Mark III’s team in case they need assistance with the software. “There are thousands of combinations in ways you can build this right, and it can break in lots and lots and lots of different ways,” Lin said.
us to do something practical with it,” Taglienti said. But the tradeoff in using ISV solutions to accelerate deployments is that margins for reselling software are usually in the single digits. On the other hand, Insight can make a much greater profit on devel- oping custom solutions with margins in the range of 40 percent. This is why Insight had made custom AI solutions a high priority. But to get the work done, the company has not only built out a team of data scientists, it has also a developed a team of business domain experts who can work with customers to understand what outcomes they’re looking for. “We really need to understand how to measure the effective- ness, and that’s where the true impact comes,” Taglienti said. As generative AI fuels a new wave of demand for services, the outlook held by Hasan, the co-founder at Quantiphi, is that the category of disruptive technologies will have a large influ- ence on the way people work soon, even if the targeted goals are small at first. “I think the belief is that it will help organizations move for- ward,” he said. “It will revolutionize the knowledge work category, especially starting with places where knowledge work is being done within the guardrails of a very tight set of specifications.”
MARK HARANAS contributed to this story.
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