Viridien Embarking on Era as a Diversified Technology Leader
After over nine decades in business, 2024 marks an exciting new era for the company formerly known as CGG. The advanced technology, digital and Earth data company that pushes the boundaries of science for a more prosperous and sustainable future has rebranded itself as Viridien – reflecting the company's strategy to transition into a broader technology company.
Agnès Boudot, Executive Vice President for HPC & Cloud Solutions, explains: “As CGG, we supported the energy industry for more than 90 years. Today, as Viridien, we continue this focus while growing new businesses in markets beyond energy.”
Agnès Boudot: Leveraging decades of HPC expertise
With over three decades in the HPC industry, Agnès brings a wealth of expertise to her role at the newly named Viridien. An engineer by training, she has held global leadership positions at major US and France technology firms.
Before joining Viridien two years ago, she spent a decade at Atos, taking on leadership roles driving initiatives in HPC, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Her diverse background covers technical engineering, team management and engaging global customers on computational challenges using cutting-edge technologies.
Agnès now oversees the building of Viridien’s new HPC & Cloud Solutions business for a wider customer base. In her role today, she identifies two key challenges: “Firstly, there are always technical challenges in our domain; we have to make the right choices about the new technologies we deploy. The technology landscape is incredibly complex and fast moving, so we work with all the major suppliers to ensure our HPC labs can fully test and evaluate the next generations of compute technology.
“But I would say our biggest challenge is expanding into new markets from our leading position in the energy industry. This begins with demonstrating the value of our expertise and technologies, and showing that fundamentally the solutions that we have developed for our energy clients address the same challenges faced by many other industries. These include the size of data volumes, the complexity of the modelling and simulations performed, as well as implementing AI at scale."
Tailored solutions for evolving needs
Harnessing over 70 years of pioneering industrial computing at scale in its global network of HPC hubs, Viridien is collaborating with new clients to optimise their HPC and cloud environments. As Agnès explains: "We have amassed considerable expertise as pioneers in production environments. We’re excited about the opportunities to bring this approach to other clients in different industries."
The company offers managed HPC and cloud services, AI/ML ecosystems with secure access, and it recently launched its flagship Outcome as a Service offering, a commercial model focused on production output rather than the more common cloud consumption-based approach.
“It's about us giving this opportunity to our customers from both technical and business standpoints,” she explains. “We really focus on providing certainty in delivering results. The time to results is super important, as is the quality of the results themselves, but it’s also important to understand the resource usage in terms of energy consumption and carbon footprint."
Recognising AI's rising importance, Viridien recently announced its AI Cloud offering for compute-intensive AI workloads. “There is a huge demand for AI and machine learning. Our AI Cloud supercharges production, optimises resource utilisation and includes access to cutting-edge Nvidia H100 GPUs, which are specifically configured for AI fine-tuning and inference workloads.
“Because we have this expertise when it comes to end-to-end optimisation and navigating the complexities of HPC, we can bring value to customers by helping them run their own production, as well as helping them stay one step ahead by testing new upcoming technologies and forecasting new trends.”
Prioritising sustainability
Sustainability is deeply ingrained in Viridien's approach. As Agnès states: "We've been moving all our data centres over to renewable energy contracts so we are 100% powered by renewable energy around the world. And in terms of energy efficiency, we've always been at the forefront of adopting and developing new technologies to reduce our energy usage and carbon footprint."
She cites examples like pioneering the use of oil immersion cooling nearly 15 years ago and optimising workloads for maximum energy efficiency. “That's really a big focus and something we include in cloud solutions for our customers. It's part of the KPIs we will deliver on.”
An exciting future roadmap
Looking ahead, Agnès is optimistic about Viridien's prospects: "The future looks very promising, and it's an exciting time in terms of the demand for AI and high-performance computing. HPC has been a core capability of Viridien right from the beginning of supercomputing, and embracing AI has been an extremely natural transition for us."
While the energy sector remains a stronghold, Viridien is extending its expertise to new verticals like life sciences and digital media. “We have decades of experience in the energy sector bringing in new technologies that ensure we are number one in what we do – imaging the Earth’s subsurface. It’s exciting to know that we are also now enabling new drug discovery, supporting the creation of new forward-looking climate models (similar to the ones we have been running for decades to understand how the Earth’s geology was formed over millions of years) and involved with image rendering for movies. We’re really looking forward to what’s coming next!”
Viridien projects its new diversification efforts will be a significant part of its future business. As the company embarks on this exciting new chapter, its decades-long legacy of pioneering industrial computing looks set to propel it towards new horizons.
“We know where our strengths lie – we want to be very focused on where we are strong, meaning the high end of complex environments and technologies,” Agnès concludes. “Because optimising outcomes in those environments is where we can bring really big value to customers.”
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