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2023-Management-Kinnami
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Interactive transcript
SUJEESH KRISHNAN: Hi, good afternoon. I'm Sujeesh Krishnan. I'm a CEO of Kinnami. I'm also an MIT alum from a few decades ago. So it's a pleasure to be back here on campus. I'm here to tell you about our resilient distributed data management platform for the computing edge. OK, so in the old paradigm, almost all data processing was done in data centers. But now, we're increasingly reliant on a connected world where data processing happens at the edge on devices like satellites, sensors, IoT, and so on.
Research from Gartner estimates that by 2025, almost 75% of all data will be generated and processed at the edge up from just 10% in 2018. Now, there are companies out there that look to securely store and manage data in the cloud. But very few organizations are doing that at the distributed computing edge. That's what we uniquely do at Kinnami.
Managing distributed data at the computing edge is a challenge for many different industries. These challenges range from having to manage millions and billions of Mo devices to dealing with securing data where there is no physical security. Kinnami is already engaged in opportunities with companies ranging from space to critical infrastructure. So Kinnami has built a distributed peer to peer data management and security software platform that enables data security, data availability, and data protection to be handled holistically.
The way our platform works is by taking any type of unstructured data. So think about a video, an image, or even a document. What we do is we break up that file into multiple pieces. Each of those pieces are then individually encrypted with their own individual encryption key and then are stored in multiple places across a distributed network. Breaking a large file into pieces enables for better security, but also enables better data storage as well as network movement optimizations, which is especially important at the edge where network connectivity isn't always guaranteed.
When data needs to be put together, these pieces are reassembled in real time from the best available places for any given user at any given point in time. Data is only decrypted when it's in use. So with a platform like this, now, organizations can now securely manage and store data on any network and on any storage device irrespective of whether it has physical security like a data center.
So you can think about our software platform like a resilient spider web with multiple network and storage paths. What this enables is better security, but also dramatically improved performance and redundancy, which is absolutely fundamental to any kind of distributed network. The ability to store data in a distributed way securely as well as move it across unreliable trustless networks is valuable to the defense sector but also to commercial organizations like space, robotics, automotive, and many others.
So over the past few years, Kinnami has progressed its concept of a resilient distributed data management system from concept to a prototype that we currently are piloting in both the defense and the commercial sectors. We're currently working in the defense sector with the US Air Force as well as the US Army Corps of Engineers. In the private sector, we have pilots going on with IBM as well as UK based new resource partners in areas such as digital twinning and 5G.
So let's take an actual use case. So one of our customers is the US Air Force. In combat search and rescue missions, when they need to go out and rescue personnel, typically, the way the process works is they have a rescue pilot that's flying around looking for people, especially in communications degraded environments, this becomes hugely a challenge. The pilot has to fly around in harsh conditions, get physical line of sight to the person to be rescued, get proof of life, and then fly back to an area where there's connectivity to communicate back to all of the rescue teams.
As you can imagine, this is a very inefficient process, time consuming, resource intensive, and risky. So with our technology on board, for the first time now, the US Air Force is now deploying these mesh networks of drones that can fly out in communications degraded types of environments, accurately locate people that need to be rescued, securely collect biometrics and other health data off the people, actually hop the data from one drone to the other until there's a network out that can be used to then push the data back out to other components of the rescue mission.
Which could be the base, could be ground teams that are going out into the field to actually conduct the rescue. So what this enables the Air Force and rescue teams to have is better situational awareness off of the rescue mission that they're going into, making the mission less risky more efficient. So this is an example of the types of solutions that Kinnami is looking to enable.
So the competition that we work in generally tends to focus on two things. It's either storage or security. So on one end, there are the hyperscalers, Google, AWS, Microsoft, et cetera that primarily look to store and secure data in a centralized way in their cloud platforms. But none of that is sufficient for managing distributed data at the computing edge. On the other end, there are endpoint security providers like Symantec and Forcepoint that typically protect laptops and desktops but provide no data protection or data availability capabilities.
What no one including some of these largest players in the market are doing today is enabling the tools and technologies to support securing distributed data at the computing edge. And if we don't solve this problem, we're going to have some serious critical infrastructure issues. And we already see that today. Every day in the press, you read about another IoT breach. And part of this is this patchwork of solutions that's being used. And so this is the problem that Kinnami is uniquely situated to solve.
So we have a season team that's leading the charge. I myself have built and grown several businesses in the past, was an early part of I2 technologies, a supply chain software company that had an IPO. Chris Chandler, our CTO is the brains behind our company, is a veteran of the data storage and security industry from Veritas and Symantec. And we have an experienced team of marketers and technologists helping us as we continue to grow our business here.
So as we build out our commercial legs and our commercial opportunities, we're here looking for two things. The first is we're exploring opportunities to continue to pilot our technology with folks that are interested in edge management applications, especially around securing and resilient data management at the edge. We're also interested in strategic partnerships with those of you that might be interested in embedding our technology into your own solutions and services as you go to market.
So thank you very much for your time. We're at the booth. And we look forward to any questions and interaction there. Thank you.
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Interactive transcript
SUJEESH KRISHNAN: Hi, good afternoon. I'm Sujeesh Krishnan. I'm a CEO of Kinnami. I'm also an MIT alum from a few decades ago. So it's a pleasure to be back here on campus. I'm here to tell you about our resilient distributed data management platform for the computing edge. OK, so in the old paradigm, almost all data processing was done in data centers. But now, we're increasingly reliant on a connected world where data processing happens at the edge on devices like satellites, sensors, IoT, and so on.
Research from Gartner estimates that by 2025, almost 75% of all data will be generated and processed at the edge up from just 10% in 2018. Now, there are companies out there that look to securely store and manage data in the cloud. But very few organizations are doing that at the distributed computing edge. That's what we uniquely do at Kinnami.
Managing distributed data at the computing edge is a challenge for many different industries. These challenges range from having to manage millions and billions of Mo devices to dealing with securing data where there is no physical security. Kinnami is already engaged in opportunities with companies ranging from space to critical infrastructure. So Kinnami has built a distributed peer to peer data management and security software platform that enables data security, data availability, and data protection to be handled holistically.
The way our platform works is by taking any type of unstructured data. So think about a video, an image, or even a document. What we do is we break up that file into multiple pieces. Each of those pieces are then individually encrypted with their own individual encryption key and then are stored in multiple places across a distributed network. Breaking a large file into pieces enables for better security, but also enables better data storage as well as network movement optimizations, which is especially important at the edge where network connectivity isn't always guaranteed.
When data needs to be put together, these pieces are reassembled in real time from the best available places for any given user at any given point in time. Data is only decrypted when it's in use. So with a platform like this, now, organizations can now securely manage and store data on any network and on any storage device irrespective of whether it has physical security like a data center.
So you can think about our software platform like a resilient spider web with multiple network and storage paths. What this enables is better security, but also dramatically improved performance and redundancy, which is absolutely fundamental to any kind of distributed network. The ability to store data in a distributed way securely as well as move it across unreliable trustless networks is valuable to the defense sector but also to commercial organizations like space, robotics, automotive, and many others.
So over the past few years, Kinnami has progressed its concept of a resilient distributed data management system from concept to a prototype that we currently are piloting in both the defense and the commercial sectors. We're currently working in the defense sector with the US Air Force as well as the US Army Corps of Engineers. In the private sector, we have pilots going on with IBM as well as UK based new resource partners in areas such as digital twinning and 5G.
So let's take an actual use case. So one of our customers is the US Air Force. In combat search and rescue missions, when they need to go out and rescue personnel, typically, the way the process works is they have a rescue pilot that's flying around looking for people, especially in communications degraded environments, this becomes hugely a challenge. The pilot has to fly around in harsh conditions, get physical line of sight to the person to be rescued, get proof of life, and then fly back to an area where there's connectivity to communicate back to all of the rescue teams.
As you can imagine, this is a very inefficient process, time consuming, resource intensive, and risky. So with our technology on board, for the first time now, the US Air Force is now deploying these mesh networks of drones that can fly out in communications degraded types of environments, accurately locate people that need to be rescued, securely collect biometrics and other health data off the people, actually hop the data from one drone to the other until there's a network out that can be used to then push the data back out to other components of the rescue mission.
Which could be the base, could be ground teams that are going out into the field to actually conduct the rescue. So what this enables the Air Force and rescue teams to have is better situational awareness off of the rescue mission that they're going into, making the mission less risky more efficient. So this is an example of the types of solutions that Kinnami is looking to enable.
So the competition that we work in generally tends to focus on two things. It's either storage or security. So on one end, there are the hyperscalers, Google, AWS, Microsoft, et cetera that primarily look to store and secure data in a centralized way in their cloud platforms. But none of that is sufficient for managing distributed data at the computing edge. On the other end, there are endpoint security providers like Symantec and Forcepoint that typically protect laptops and desktops but provide no data protection or data availability capabilities.
What no one including some of these largest players in the market are doing today is enabling the tools and technologies to support securing distributed data at the computing edge. And if we don't solve this problem, we're going to have some serious critical infrastructure issues. And we already see that today. Every day in the press, you read about another IoT breach. And part of this is this patchwork of solutions that's being used. And so this is the problem that Kinnami is uniquely situated to solve.
So we have a season team that's leading the charge. I myself have built and grown several businesses in the past, was an early part of I2 technologies, a supply chain software company that had an IPO. Chris Chandler, our CTO is the brains behind our company, is a veteran of the data storage and security industry from Veritas and Symantec. And we have an experienced team of marketers and technologists helping us as we continue to grow our business here.
So as we build out our commercial legs and our commercial opportunities, we're here looking for two things. The first is we're exploring opportunities to continue to pilot our technology with folks that are interested in edge management applications, especially around securing and resilient data management at the edge. We're also interested in strategic partnerships with those of you that might be interested in embedding our technology into your own solutions and services as you go to market.
So thank you very much for your time. We're at the booth. And we look forward to any questions and interaction there. Thank you.