In December 2016, PLDA spun-off its QuickPlay and QuickStore activities into a newly formed Accelize organization. With over 6,000 customers worldwide, PLDA GROUP has three divisions: Accelize, PCI Express controller IP, and SoC design training. Accelize’s mission is to provide workload Acceleration-as-a-Service using FPGA for Cloud and Enterprise users.

Accelize is fully owned by PLDA; however, Accelize will seek Series A capital later this year. The company has 25 employees. Company headquarters is in France, an R&D Center is located in Italy and an office is in San Jose, CA.

By 2020, it is estimated that one-third of the 13 million servers shipped in data centers will be equipped with FPGAs for acceleration functions, making the FPGA-based hardware acceleration market worth several hundred million dollars. Accelize is dedicated to developing, marketing, and supporting technologies that make FPGA accelerator boards and appliances easier to acquire, build, and use.

QuickPlay is a graphical and C/C++ tool that enables engineers to implement data flow applications in FPGA boards efficiently with no hardware design expertise. It is used in conjunction with QuickStore, a collaborative online store offering IP blocks for integration via QuickPlay, and ready-to-use FPGA accelerators.

Algodone’s technology provides the core DRM, authentication and monetization component inside the FPGA. Accelize runs the license servers and all infrastructure for production, distribution, metering and other forms of monetization. Although Gaël Paul is a co-founder of Algodone, he is now 100% associated with Accelize as CTO & Architect. Accelize and Algodone only have a contractual business relationship.

Accelize has now focused this solution into AccelStore, an app-store like platform-independent online marketplace of ready-to-use accelerator functions developed by a growing ecosystem of 3rd party developer companies, that can be seamlessly deployed on different Cloud FPGA instances or enterprise platforms.

The company’s framework enables the production, distribution and monetization of Accelerator Functions. Currently, the marketplace hosts accelerator functions for data compression, search-and-replace, image encoding and security running on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OVH platforms and delivering performance improvements from 10x to more than 1000x compared to traditional pure software implementations.

AccelStore provides a simple and fast way to evaluate and deploy accelerator functions on host applications. The associated RESTful API functions enable cloud users to launch any AccelStore accelerator function on any supported Cloud FPGA instance in less than five minutes. This simplifies the evaluation process and demonstrates the value of FPGA acceleration for specific workloads without having to invest much time or money. These API functions can also be integrated into the end application providing the acceleration capability with minimal modification.

Accelerator functions on AccelStore are priced based on the volume of data processed so users get extremely accurate and predictable pricing for acceleration services. The latest Xilinx and Intel FPGAs are supported by the Accelize framework. Most of Accelize's Accelerator Functions run on multiple Xilinx- and Intel-based FPGA platforms (Cloud FPGA instances and FPGA cards).

Video transcoding is an ideal application for FPGA acceleration and is an early focus area for Accelize. In addition, a wide range of accelerator functions are currently being developed by partners and will be available soon. Partners include CAST, Axonerve, ALSE, Secure-IC and many others. Accelize also offers custom accelerator function development and will add support for additional Cloud Service Provider’s FPGA instances.

Arnaud Schleich, CEO of PLDA Group

Jean-Yves Brena, Co-founder & CEO (Director of PLDA Group, previously President & COO of PLDA)

Gaël Paul, CTO & Architect (Co-founder of Algodone, previously VP of SW Engineering at Achronix)

Hugues Deneux, Director of Engineering (Also VP of Operations at PLDA)

Stephane Monboisset, VP of Marketing & Partnerships (previously Director, Marketing & Business Development at PLDA and Sr. Product Marketing Manager - Processing Platforms at Xilinx)

Philippe Meimoun, VP Sales & Business Development (previously VP Sales and Business Development NA at Outscale)

www.pldagroup.com