An interview with Sunlight founder and CEO, Julian Chesterfield, on SDC Awards win
1. Congratulations for winning ‘Hyper-Convergence Innovation of the Year’ at the SDC awards 2021 — the premier awards for the Storage, Digitalisation and Cloud industry. Can you tell me more about Sunlight’s journey so far and what the award means for the company?
Sunlight is a fast growing technology company with a key focus on edge and MSP infrastructure.
The Sunlight technology has been in development for many years — evolving out of a collaboration with ARM to build a lightweight virtualisation platform for embedded device processors. Since coming out of stealth towards the end of 2020, Sunlight propelled into a massive scale up phase — acquiring many new customers in the data center and at the edge.
This award recognises all of the work the team have done to get us to this stage and the growth that Sunlight is experiencing. We are honoured to receive this award. As a young company, it’s very significant for us to be recognised as a leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) innovator in a category with key industry competitors.
2. What does it mean to you personally?
Personally, it makes me proud to see the company that I’ve grown from the beginning being recognised with this industry award. It validates the hard work and energy that all of us have been putting in to grow and establish the company. And it also validates the technology vision that we had since the outset.
3. A more established HCI player, Nutanix, was named runner up in the same category. What do you think this says about innovation and where the industry is heading?
Awarding Sunlight the ‘Hyper-convergence Innovation of the Year’ category demonstrates that Sunlight is the new disruptive innovator in the market. It also reflects a trend that we’re seeing — a demand for HCI technology outside of the core data center.
Our fast growing customer base — especially at the edge — shows that traditional HCI technology is adapting and new markets are opening up that are perfect for disruptive players, like Sunlight.
4. What a way to end Sunlight’s first year since public launch! What’s next for Sunlight in 2022?
Sunlight continues to break new boundaries in performance efficiency and footprint as we adopt a wider variety of hardware infrastructure at the edge.
For example, we will soon be launching our ARM-based NVIDIA Jetson Xavier support, which will be made public in first half of 2022.
Sunlight also continues to embrace and build an ecosystem of partners that operate across this hybrid landscape to bring a richer set of technology solutions to end customers.
