Discover how nine innovative tech companies are transforming AI infrastructure, data management, and cloud optimization - key insights from Silicon Valley with the 60th IT Press Tour.
The 60th IT Press Tour, held in Silicon Valley from January 27-31, 2025, showcased nine innovative companies addressing critical challenges in AI infrastructure, data management, and cloud optimization. Here's a comprehensive look at the key takeaways for IT professionals from each company visited.
MLCommons: Setting AI Performance Standards
MLCommons, a non-profit consortium with over 125 members, has established itself as the go-to standard for measuring AI system performance. Their MLPerf benchmarks cover training, inference, mobile, IoT, storage, and automotive use cases. For IT professionals, MLCommons' benchmarks provide essential metrics for evaluating AI infrastructure investments, with over 56,000 benchmark results helping teams make informed decisions about system selection and optimization.
Hammerspace: Revolutionizing Data Access for AI
Hammerspace's Global Data Platform addresses one of the most pressing challenges in AI deployment: efficient data access across distributed infrastructure. Their innovative Tier 0 storage capability transforms unused local NVMe storage in GPU servers into shared storage, delivering impressive performance improvements and cost savings. The platform achieved a 10x revenue growth in 2024, demonstrating strong market validation of its approach to unified data access.
Aquila Clouds: Taming Cloud and AI Costs
As organizations struggle with spiraling cloud and AI costs, Aquila Clouds offers a comprehensive management platform combining FinOps intelligence and usage-based billing. Their platform helps enterprises optimize spending while maintaining security and performance, which is particularly valuable for organizations dealing with expensive AI workloads across multiple cloud providers.
Crystal DBA: AI-Powered PostgreSQL Expertise
Crystal DBAÂ brings AI-powered database administration capabilities to organizations adopting PostgreSQL. Their platform is an AI teammate that helps teams optimize database performance and reduce management overhead through intelligent automation. With PostgreSQL's growing enterprise adoption, Crystal DBA's approach to democratizing database expertise addresses a critical market need.
Volumez: Maximizing GPU Infrastructure Efficiency
Volumez's Data Infrastructure as a Service platform helps organizations maximize GPU utilization and automate AI/ML pipelines. Their cloud-aware approach to infrastructure optimization has demonstrated impressive results in MLPerf benchmarks, showing significant improvements in GPU utilization and cost efficiency for AI training workloads.
Komprise: From Data Management to AI Data Engine
Komprise has evolved from pure data management to becoming an AI data engine, helping organizations prepare their unstructured data for AI initiatives. Their platform's ability to detect sensitive data and automate AI data workflows while maintaining security and governance positions them well for enterprises adopting AI. Customers typically see 70% savings on storage costs and 27x faster data migrations.
CloudFabrix (now Fabrix.ai): Autonomous IT Operations
Rebranding as Fabrix.ai, the company introduced an agentic AI platform combining data, automation, and AI fabrics to enable autonomous IT operations. Their platform helps organizations build and deploy AI agents that can handle complex IT tasks with minimal human intervention, which is particularly valuable for telecommunications providers and managed service providers dealing with complex environments.
TrueNAS: Open Enterprise Storage
iXsystems is rebranding to its TrueNASÂ platform and continues to gain traction as a cost-effective alternative to traditional enterprise storage vendors. With features like native ZFS integration and defense-level security, TrueNAS offers organizations a way to reduce storage costs by 30% or more while maintaining enterprise-grade capabilities. Their growth metrics, including a 300% increase in million-dollar deployments, suggest growing enterprise confidence in open-source storage solutions.
Panzura: Modernizing File Services for Multi-Cloud
Panzura's cloud-native file services platform helps enterprises manage unstructured data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Their upcoming CloudFS 8.5 Adapt release introduces regional store capabilities and instant node recovery, addressing key challenges in distributed data access and business continuity. The platform's FIPS 140-3 certification for encryption makes it particularly attractive for organizations with stringent security requirements.
Key Trends Emerging from the Tour
Several essential trends emerged across the company presentations:
AI Infrastructure Optimization:Â Organizations are focusing on maximizing the efficiency of expensive GPU infrastructure through better data access and resource management.
Cost Control:Â With AI adoption driving up cloud and infrastructure costs, solutions for cost optimization and efficiency are becoming critical.
Data Security:Â As AI adoption accelerates, protecting sensitive data and ensuring proper governance has become a top priority.
Automation: There's a strong push toward autonomous operations using AI agents to handle complex IT tasks.
Open Source:Â Enterprise adoption of open-source solutions grows, particularly in storage and database management.
For IT professionals, these companies offer innovative solutions to critical challenges in AI adoption, data management, and cloud optimization. The tour highlighted how the industry is evolving to address the complexities of modern enterprise IT environments, focusing on making AI infrastructure more efficient and manageable.