Executive Interview: Michael Wu, GM and President of Phison US

Michael Wu is the GM and President of Phison US. Michael is an acclaimed technology expert in the NAND storage sector and boasts over 17 years of industry experience. Over the course of his 14+ years at Phison, Michael has held positions such as GM, Director of Global Customer Relations and Project Manager to position Phison as the world’s leading NAND storage solution company. Under his leadership at Phison, Michael manages and oversees the company’s USA operation to drive sales growth and profitability. During his tenure at Phison, Michael previously coordinated customer activities and support for the North America, South America and European regions and provided technical support to design-in projects and managing product life cycles. Previously, Michael was the Verification Engineer at RF Micro Devices. Michael holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Tell us about your company?

Phison is a global leader in NAND controllers and storage solutions that delivers industry-first solutions built for the modern era of AI workloads and enterprise computing.

Today, Phison is one of the best kept secrets in the global tech sector as the largest SSD supplier for over 20 years that many are unaware of due to its white label business model origin.

For over two decades, Phison’s focus has been on offering customized design solutions and delivering turnkey SSDs on behalf of huge brands to address today’s enterprise storage challenges, particularly with the onslaught of AI applications. In May, with the launch of its PASCARI brand, Phison came out of stealth mode and showed its commitment to foster rapid advancements in enterprise innovation to keep up with evolving dynamic needs of the enterprise storage market. Then, by combining the power of PASCARI with Phison’s proprietary software, Phison launched aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite, designed for optimal memory and storage usage to meet the demands of SMBs looking to leverage GenAI. The debut of these products demonstrates that Phison is on a mission to democratize AI so that enterprises of ALL sizes can participate.

What problems are you solving?

With aiDAPTIV+, Phison is removing the barriers of entry for small and medium size businesses to access the power of GenAI. While the hype cycle for GenAI has been robust, it is at an inflection point with financial market wobbles because many companies are not yet investing due to concerns about the ROI. CIOs and decision makers will not buy-in until it becomes accessible, affordable and profitable. Additionally, it requires that companies of all sizes can participate to realize the true potential and usher in the next Industrial Revolution. This remains a hurdle as Generative AI requires massive computing power that is mostly inaccessible for small and mid-size companies. If these companies want to do their own AI projects, they typically must do them through a cloud service provider, meaning the company suddenly loses a portion of control over its data.

At Phison, we have developed the aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite as a solution to enable any organization to run generative AI projects and large language models (LLMs) from regular on-premises workstations. Our solution is an AI-specialized aiDAPTIV+ SSD with proprietary software and tools, along with an ecosystem of support through our trusted partners.

With this aiDAPTIV+ SSD solution, companies can develop their own AI projects and retain complete control over their data on-premises. The “entry fee” to generative AI is no longer exclusive to large enterprises.”

What application areas are your strongest?

Prior to the release of aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite to the market, small and medium-sized businesses dealt with limited technology options offering small and imprecise training without the ability to scale beyond 7B model training. Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ solution enables significantly larger model fine-tuning to allow users to run workloads previously reserved for data centers. For the first time in the U.S., aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite was demonstrated as an end-to-end on-premises generative AI solution at FMS 2024 and earned “Best of Show, Most Innovative AI Application”. Now even users with limited resources are empowered to train large language models. This AI appliance solution allows system integrators to build turn-key large language model training systems from start to successful finish. With a simplistic user experience that turns raw data into tokenized data, it runs the fine-tuning process with Llama-3 70B precision and offers the ability to ask questions about the data, all from a local domain on premises. Data can be fine-tuned in about 4 hours which is sufficient for most business applications.

At a game changing price point of about $40K, aiDAPTIV+ removes the barriers to entry for small and medium sized businesses, organizations fully own their data and can fine tune it with a turnkey solution, no additional IT or engineering staff is required to run it, and security risks and expenses are minimized with keeping data on premises. Most importantly, trained data delivers immediate business value.

In less than a year, the market response has been remarkable with over 100 enterprises using it in a variety of use cases. The solution has addressed universal pain points like onboarding new employees, keeping up with professional development needs, keeping up with coding demands, and the need to automate tasks to keep up with huge data volumes.

What keeps your customers up at night?

IT managers that have to keep up with evolving technology demands with less budget and staff to run it worry about security, loss of data, failures of legacy systems, unpredictable cloud service bills, vendor lock-in from cloud providers, and fear of missing out on promising technologies like GenAI.

What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?

Prior to the launch of Phison’s aiDAPTIV+, only large enterprises with deep pockets could access and afford GenAI. We were the first to use storage as memory to lower the price point from $1million plus for equipment with associated fees for cloud services to $40K located on premises. It takes about 4 hours to train LLMs, this is acceptable for most businesses.

Now even users with limited resources are empowered to train large language models. Our end-to-end AI appliance solution has been recognized for allowing system integrators to build turn-key large language model training systems from start to successful finish. With a simplistic user experience that turns raw data into tokenized data, aiDAPTIV+ runs the fine-tuning process with Llama-3 70B precision and offers the ability to ask questions about the data, all from a local domain on premises.

What new features/technology are you working on?

Phison continues to invest in R&D and engage with customers to understand business challenges to best align roadmap to modern customer requirements. As the aiDAPTIV+ and Pascari brands grow, so will the robust set of features to meet the current and future industry needs.

How do customers normally engage with your company?

Previously customers relied solely on channel partners and system integrators to purchase Phison products. One in four SSDs in applications today are our white label products SSDs and NAND controllers. With Pascari and aiDAPTIV+ we bring the technology to the end user ourselves and with select partners.

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