Intel to Acquire Granulate

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Intel Corporation announced an agreement to acquire Granulate Cloud Solutions Ltd, an Israel-based developer of real-time continuous optimization software. The acquisition of Granulate will help cloud and data center customers maximize compute workload performance and reduce infrastructure and cloud costs. Deal terms are not being disclosed.  

“Today’s cloud and data center customers demand scalable, high-performance software to make the most of their hardware deployments,” said Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel. “Granulate’s cutting-edge autonomous optimization software can be applied to production workloads without requiring the customer to make changes to its code, driving optimized hardware and software value for every cloud and data center customer.”

Greg Lavender, chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group at Intel, said: “We are building our portfolio of software optimization tools that offer flexible and scalable capabilities that allow us to meet the growing demand of the ubiquitous compute era. Granulate’s innovative approach to real-time optimization software complements Intel’s existing capabilities by helping customers realize performance gains, cloud cost reductions and continual workload learning.”

While cloud computing and microservices have created a new era of flexibility in distributed applications and deployment scalability, modern architectures have introduced more complex performance issues that are not easily managed by traditional operating systems and runtimes. Additionally, customers often deploy older Linux distributions and application libraries that are not up to date with the latest advancements in today’s high-performance CPUs. Intel is committed to helping its customers ensure they are right-sizing their compute clusters, instance types and cloud deployments.

Granulate’s autonomous optimization service solves these issues by reducing CPU utilization and application latencies. It does this by learning the customer’s application and deploying a customized set of continuous optimizations at runtime. This enables deployment on smaller compute clusters and instance types to improve application performance and drive down cloud and data center costs. Granulate’s service does not require developer intervention nor does it require the customer to make changes to its own code. Optimizations for the latest CPUs can be applied even on legacy Linux distributions and runtimes.

Granulate’s autonomous optimization service enables cloud and data center customers to significantly improve the performance of their deployments, reduce operational overhead and lower application costs.

“Together with Intel, we believe we can help customers achieve meaningful cost reductions and five times the throughput across workloads,” said Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate. “As a part of Intel, Granulate will be able to deliver autonomous optimization capabilities to even more customers globally and rapidly expand its offering with the help of Intel’s 19,000 software engineers.”

Intel and Granulate’s relationship began in late 2019, when Granulate was part of the first graduating class of Intel® Ignite, the startup accelerator program that taps into Intel’s resources to help early-stage companies succeed. Over the past year, Intel and Granulate have worked together under a commercial agreement to collaborate on workload optimization on Xeon deployments. This collaboration resulted in gains in performance and decreases in costs for customers running on Intel processors. With the acquisition of Granulate, Intel will rapidly scale Granulate’s optimization software, including across Intel’s data center portfolio. Intel is investing in growth opportunities enabled by software, including disruptive end-to-end artificial intelligence and security platforms, services, and APIs.

Transaction Details and Timing 

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022, subject to typical closing conditions. At that time, Granulate’s approximately 120 employees will be integrated into Intel’s Datacenter and AI business unit.