Intelligent CIO North America Issue 52 | Page 18

Black Box strengthens data center solutions with Arizona Hyperscale Center of Excellence and leadership expansion
Ex-Oracle and Google engineers get $ 7m from Accel for public launch of Simplismart
NEWS
Black Box strengthens data center solutions with Arizona Hyperscale Center of Excellence and leadership expansion

Black Box has appointed Matt Easton as Vice President of Data

Center Solutions and outlined progression of the Western Region Training Facility in Chandler , Arizona , which has become a stateof-the-art Hyperscale Data Center of Excellence catering to both hyperscale and enterprise data centers .
Completed in late 2022 , the Chandler facility joins a growing network of Black Box ’ s Center of Excellence offices – which includes locations in Montgomery , Alabama ; Sterling , Virginia , Austin , Texas ; Plano , Texas and San Antonio – further reinforcing Black Box ’ s commitment to advancing data center mobilization , pre-con services and construction .
Black Box is committed to expanding its data center practice to provide cutting-edge solutions and expertise for the critical and evolving data market
“ Our new Hyperscale Data Center of Excellence , along with our participation in the 7x24 Exchange Summit , focuses on developing the talent and infrastructure needed to meet the growing demands . By combining cutting-edge facilities with strategic workforce development , we ensure that Black Box remains at the forefront of hyperscale and enterprise solutions , ready to support our clients ’ evolving needs in this rapidly expanding sector ,” said Easton .
Before joining Black Box , Easton served as the Vice President of Operations at E2 Optics , where he led teams in project controls , estimation , talent acquisition , DAS / wireless and large-scale telecommunications construction .
Black Box said Easton – with over 27 years of experience in integrated technology solutions – was a “ valuable addition ” to the organization .
Ex-Oracle and Google engineers get $ 7m from Accel for public launch of Simplismart

Simplismart has announced a $ 7m funding round for its infrastructure that enables organizations to deploy AI models seamlessly – positioning itself as the critical enabler for AI ’ s transition into mainstream enterprise operations .

The series A funding round was led by Accel with participation from Shastra VC , Titan Capital , and high-profile angels , including Akshay Kothari , Co-Founder of Notion . leading to poor ROI , data privacy , and the need to control and customize the system to avoid downtime and limits from other services ,” said Amritanshu Jain , Co-Founder and CEO , Simplismart .
“ As the models get larger and the workload increases , it will be imperative to have command over the orchestration workflows . Every new technology goes through the same cycle : exactly what Terraform did for cloud , android studio for mobile , and Databricks / Snowflake did for data .”
Anand Daniel , Partner , Accel , said : “ As GenAI undergoes its Cambrian explosion moment , developers are starting to realise that customizing & deploying open-source models on their infrastructure carries significant merit .
“ We were happy to see that Simplismart ’ s team saw this opportunity quite early .” p
This tranche , more than ten times the size of their previous round , will fuel R & D and growth for their enterprise-focused MLOps orchestration platform .
“ Building generative AI applications is a core need for enterprises today . However , the adoption of generative AI is far behind the rate of new developments . It ’ s because enterprises struggle with four bottlenecks : lack of standardized workflows , high costs
18 INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA www . intelligentcio . com