A two-year push in software development at Virtium Solid State Storage and Memory in Rancho Santa Margarita has led to a product offering designed to ease storage and transfer of huge data files in industrial networks.
Prototype testing of Internet of Things network-connected storage system StorFly-loT is under way. The stand-alone device is scheduled to be released early next year.
It features encrypted software, hardware and integration, and is being promoted as a money and time saver, two of the biggest challenges in handling big data, while providing actionable intelligence in real time.
“We’ll be the first in the market with this IoT device,” said founder and Chief Executive Phu Hoang, one of five recipients of the Business Journal’s third annual Innovator of the Year Awards on Sept. 12 at Hotel Irvine (see stories, pages 1, 16, 17 and 18).
IoT refers to any device connected to the internet or that enables machines to communicate with other machines.
Some customers are already using the StorFly-loT, which connects to big cloud networks, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, but a bigger sampling is geared for the fourth quarter.
A locomotive company that runs inspection tests every three days on every track mile is among the rollout customers.
“The amount of data that comes through is terabytes and terabytes,” said Gary Drossel, Virtium executive vice president of business development and strategy. “There’s no way to get Wi-Fi or LTE connections to stream 8 terabytes of data.”
Virtium is working with the company to provide local storage on the locomotive, allowing the operator to crunch and transfer much less data, perhaps only a gigabyte or two.
The product innovation and Virtium’s overall performance in the past few years have been buoyed by two waves of industry expansion, according to Drossel.
The first, he said, is the drive to the faster 5G connectivity that’s fueled the evolution of intelligent machines and products, such as lighting systems, Wi-Fi cameras, smart hubs and wearable electronics, among countless others. The other driver is data intelligence, or actionable insights gained through historic behavior and predictive analytics that dwarf the amount of content produced in social media, photos and video streams.
The trends, combined with an investment of an undisclosed amount about two years ago from Newport Beach-based L Squared Capital Partners, has helped Virtium grow its top line.
The maker of solid-state drives, which use chips to store and transfer data, posted $75 million in sales in the 12 months through June, up 50% from two years earlier.
The increase won it the 42nd spot among midsize companies—those with revenue between $10 million and $99.9 million—on this month’s Business Journal list of fastest-growing private companies in Orange County.
Virtium employs about 150, some 100 of those in OC. It maintains a design team in Vietnam, sources flash memory chips from all over the world and does its finished-goods manufacturing at its HQ in Rancho Santa Margarita.
Solid-state drives were still in their infancy when Hoang established Virtium in Huntington Beach in 1997.
He didn’t target the consumer market, typically the first adopters, or the corporate sector, which usually brings higher margins.
He zeroed in on the industrial market, offering solid-state drives geared to telecoms and the medical, transportation, media, and automated-manufacturing sectors.
The choice was partly by design, since both the consumer and corporate segments are served by large global storage-drive makers, including Kingston Technology Inc. in Fountain Valley, which had an estimated $6.6 billion in annual sales last year (see story, page 1).
And it was partly necessity, since the startup was developing from a consultancy to a manufacturer with nowhere near the capital needed to compete with big players.
The move turned out to be financially wise. Virtium now has some of the world’s largest companies as customers, including Alcatel-Lucent, Boeing, Emerson, General Dynamics, General Electric, IBM, Intel and Motorola.
Hoang, winner of a Business Journal Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award in 2013, picked OC to establish the business after a long journey from his native Vietnam.
He arrived in Ontario, Canada, in 1984 with just a shirt, a pair of pants and flip-flops. The little English he knew had been learned at an Indonesian refugee camp that housed hundreds of Vietnamese who fled their country in the post-war years of the 1970s and ’80s.
He was co-captain of a boat with 66 passengers that raced out to sea as bullets whizzed by its bow. The engine of the boat, which had been built and stored in secret, broke down on the open water, eventually drifting to Indonesia after nine days at sea.
He moved to OC in 1991 for a job as a computer engineer designing memory and storage and held several jobs before starting the consultancy that grew into Virtium. The company name is a variation of a Latin term that draws on integrity, strength and virtue.
