Finally - we're there!

12 December 2018
gr2

As a product manager, there are many aspects to your role that get you really fired up and excited. One of those for me is the build up to launching a new product. We work tightly and intensely in cross-functional, highly matrixed teams across the planet to bring it all together across engineering, marketing communications, supply chain and logistics, legal, sales and channel partners, finance….the list goes on.

The public announcement itself is the pinnacle of many months of hard work across these teams to launch and deliver our latest solutions that started life as a VoC (voice of the customer) insight. That insight is followed by gathering ideas, collaboration across the company, roadmaps, concepts, business cases and leadership reviews…

And here we now are with our shiny new product - ready to go. It’s not been without its challenges and stresses, as any product manager will attest. However: it really is quite something when I take a breath to stop and think about it.

Remarkable synchronization

I’ve never felt this remarkable synchronization and energy more than I have over the past few months with our exciting new strategic partnership and product announcements with EIZO Rugged Solutions. Abaco and EIZO have formed this partnership to provide 3U VPX and XMC solutions based on the NVIDIA Pascal Class of GPU/GPGPUs to bring our customers the latest in NVIDIA’s embedded GPU technology.

The first two new products arising from this relationship are the GR2, a 3U VPX graphics output board, and the GR4 video capture board. They offer our customers huge leaps in GPU performance, resolution and frame rates and, for the first time in our GPU line-up, video capture and output.

They can facilitate enormous improvements in moving map, operator display, ISR and situational awareness applications. Or, in radar and a wealth of AI applications, their highly parallel GPGPUs with their thousands of CUDA cores offer the processing power needed for these highly compute-intensive tasks. They do all this - and allow our customers to do more with less, which in turn can lead to system cost savings as well.

Circle of life

I have to say: I am truly excited by these products, by our roadmaps and by their possibilities they deliver to our customers as I manage them through their long lifecycles in our defense and aerospace business.

And so, the circle of product life moves on: we have a number of new product developments bubbling away at various stages – and they too will hopefully see the light of day, just as the GR2 and GR4 have.

So, while I’m stuck in traffic on my way home, I take a moment to recall what an amazing process it is, in any company, to see and be a part of turning ideas, insights, lots of hard work and teamwork into a product reality that our customers value.

It’s pretty cool.

Stuart Heptonstall

Stuart is Abaco’s Global Product Manager for graphics and related products, including the extensive work we are doing in AI and machine learning, based on NVIDIA’s technology. Located at our European HQ in Towcester, England, Stuart achieved a BEng in Communications Systems Engineering at Leeds Metropolitan University, and an MBA from Loughborough University.