Innovana Solutions | Leading with Determination & Commitment | Mitch McDermid
Mitch McDermid
President & CEO
When Mitch McDermid launched Innovana, he had an evident vision of what he wanted the company to look like and what it could offer that was different from existing IT services and consulting firms. There was a clear need for a cloud-based services and business automation solutions provider that would address the needs of SMBs both from a pricing and service standpoint in Canada. Mitch and his team have been laser-focused on serving that niche.
One of the company’s most influential and innovative solutions is its Innovana Transformational Resource Acquisition Development (iTRAD™) program, which involves Innovana partnering with leading IT learning institutions across Canada to help students launch their careers. “Grads come and work with us, get real-world skills, and are welcome to go work client-side should they wish, which allows us to provide dependable resource supply chain management for our clients,” says Mitch. “The beauty of iTRAD is that it’s a made-in-Canada solution that utilizes our talent here at home instead of offshoring while supporting the growth and development of Canada’s IT industry.”
Another part of Mitch’s vision when founding Innovana was to keep the size of the firm SMB-friendly.
“The biggest names in automation/AI implementation are great at what they do, but because they’re so big they’re also slower to move and react,” explains Mitch.
“I wanted Innovana to be agile and able to turn on a dime whenever needed to react quickly to our clients’ demands. That’s the level of responsiveness companies need to stay on the leading edge.”
A momentous step for Mitch has been to be involved with Indigena Technologies. Innovana is a 49% share owner of this 51% Aboriginally owned technology firm that provides the foundation to help Aboriginal youth and women grow their careers in IT across Canada. This endeavor will have a long-term, meaningful, and positive impact on career development for generations of Indigenous people. Innovana’s role is to provide Indigena with long-term strategic business growth and Technology support service infrastructure direction, with the long-term goal to develop Indigena Technology Inc. into one of the largest Aboriginal Technology companies in Canada and North America that supplies technology advancement not only to Indigenous communities across Canada but also open up a whole new opportunity for Indigenous people of Canada to develop their passions and professional careers in IT across Canada and contributing to the expansion of IT Growth as Canadians.
Becoming A Supportive Leader
For Mitch, learning to be a good leader is an ongoing process, starting with being a good listener. Giving everyone in the room a voice and listening intently before forming an opinion or making a decision is vital. A good leader understands the value of surrounding oneself with smart people and that a leader is only as good as the team, they create.
Being a good leader also means being open to new directions and approaches and taking accountability for your decisions. “I also feel deeply responsible for the people I am leading and am always careful to stay within the mindset that I am responsible for multiple things within the organization at once: the team, our company vision, fiscal growth, career development, and more, and need to maintain a healthy balance within the organization,” says Mitch. “My background as an elite athlete created an incredible foundation for my leadership skills. As an athlete, you learn how important it is to set goals and find a path to achieve them through hard work, discipline, focus, determination, commitment, and passion. These are all qualities I bring to Innovana every day.”
Building A Brand
A considerable achievement Innovana has attained is introducing one of the biggest grocery retailers in the world to the iTRAD program so they could grow their tech resources here in Canada rather than offshoring some of their support. This allowed them to become much more Canada-centric while decreasing the outsourced consulting costs to large IT consulting firms by 65%. This led to higher staff retention while reducing their head-count cost from $270K down to just $65K. “One of the other great advantages of hiring students is that companies enjoy greater long-term retention – on average between five to seven years,” he says. “Meanwhile, we support the students’ career growth with dev ops training and certify them on major platforms such as Microsoft, Google, Service Now, Workday, and more.”
Another success Innovana enjoyed was when they worked with a tier-one telco and internet provider to automate their centralized procurement process. The goal was to automate the P.O. process and approvals with greater accuracy. Before implementation, the firm could get a large order, but there was no tracking process for validating the receipt of a received order. This caused them to carry above $220 million in expense liability. Through automation, they enjoyed significantly greater sign-off, and accountability on orders received.
“But the achievement I’m most proud of is seeing my vision of iTRAD come to life and continue to gain momentum. We’re giving grads real-world opportunities to learn while making an income, contributing positively to society, and keeping IT jobs here in Canada,” says Mitch proudly. “It started with us developing partnerships with a couple of learning institutions in Ottawa and Toronto, and it’s growing. We have a partnership opportunity we’re exploring in British Columbia and have another Centre of Excellence – iGENESIS LAB, arranged with a prominent downtown Toronto college, which will focus on a complete 4 stage development operations environment to handle all aspects of managed services, cyber security, data management, and analytics, and complete services to support Microsoft, Amazon, Google suite of applications.” Innovana has also developed an Innovana Automation Office – iAUTOMATE – that will provide that unique opportunity to have access to complete automation vs. having to invest in infrastructure and personnel to support their in-house operations. This service will support SMBs and specific enterprise environments with enterprise-level service at SMB-friendly price points.
Innovana has two more iTRAD labs under development: one in Ottawa specializing in cloud/IT services for the federal government and one in British Columbia that will complement our iGENESIS lab in Toronto. They plan to expand their footprint into the US with locations in Houston (Texas), Raleigh (North Carolina), and Northern California. “We are also expanding our services into cyber security, and a few new technology platforms that will heighten the trend in Innovative Technology for industry,” adds Mitch. “We will combine this with our R&D growth with iGENESIS Labs to open up and expand software development and interesting new ways to utilize technology for Government, Retail, Travel, Entertainment, FinTech, Pharma, Telco and Business Operation advancement and innovation.”
The Unique Solutions
The company offers powerful Systems on Chips (SoCs) and a software suite for creating customized solutions. And the current flagship is HyperX Midnight, a radiation-hardened supercomputer class SoC designed for use in LEO, MEO, and GEO (low-, middle-, and geosynchronous earth orbit) satellites.
HyperX Midnight, soon after its release, became the most advanced space processor available, with roughly four times the computing throughput at half the power demand of competitive chips.
“This is a significant step, as performance and power consumption control the magnitude of a satellite. We put enormous performance in a small package with low power obligations, so our customers can use much smaller satellite busses (chassis) which conserves millions in launch budgets,” says Walt. Another key feature of Coherent’s HyperX multi-chip modules compared to its competitors is that its chips are C-programmable and use familiar tools and debugging processes. “The solutions can be built on our chip in about 6 months whereas competitive FPGA offerings usually require 24 months of development time using complex hardware development languages and a very difficult process called timing closure,” he adds.
Coherent Logix’s SoCs are also completely reprogrammable, even in space, and can modify tasks in less than 50ns (nanoseconds). These two elements combine to create a huge advantage. Coherent Logix can make four products in the time our competitors take to build just one, and we can continuously enhance those products even if they are in orbit around the Earth.
These attributes herald back to Coherent Logix’s patented invention: the HyperX fabric. And this fabric is common to all Coherent Logix’ chips – both Space-qualified and terrestrial – so these advantages are available whether users are building a satellite, 5G cellular, secure networks, AI platforms, or 8K video encoders. Coherent Logix has served the Space 2.0 and Defense markets for 15 years. High-performance computing (HPC) with low power draw, on-orbit programmability, and ease of modular multimodal MCM design are the keys to success in these markets according to Walt.
The Leader who Makes the Difference
Walt Gall, Ph.D. serves as CEO on Coherent Logix’s executive management team. He is a business leader who builds world-class AI teams, products, and strategic partnerships for top-tier start-ups (Saffron, Intel acquisition) and large corporations (Amazon Devices, Meta (formerly FB).
As CEO of Coherent Logix, the leader in low-power, high-performance C- programmable processors for the embedded systems market, he recently helped guide the company through a funding initiative that raised $85 million.
Under Walt’s leadership, in early 2023 Coherent Logix launched HyperX Midnight, the world’s most advanced space processor, with roughly four times the computing throughput at half the power demand of competitive chips. Coherent Logix is currently in its fourth generation of HyperX processors for Space 2.0 and Defense, Connected Devices, and Media & Communications industries. The company has been granted more than 375 patents and 125 patents are pending.
Over the past decade, Walt has held various leadership roles on executive teams, including Amazon Alexa AI, Meta’s AR/VR and AI divisions, and Intel AI, with responsibilities for annual operational planning, developing a 3-year strategy, and managing more than $500M R&D and production budgets. He led product launches on conversational AI voice assistants on industry-leading consumer and social media devices with cloud-to-edge embedded applications and the development of several enterprise decision-support AI/IOT solutions in wellness, health, hi-tech, and insurance sectors.
Walt’s leadership style is centered on the customer and making data-informed, timely decisions. This customer-centric team approach is critical as the company scales its products and continues to expand its channel partnerships. “I’m referring to our direct customers and strategic partners, our leadership team and employees, and our Board of Directors,” he adds. “We have a collective interest in growing revenue and partnering on developing and commercializing products that have a meaningful impact on society.”
Armed with this mindset, Walt and the rest of the leadership team have skillfully guided Coherent Logix into hypergrowth markets: Space 2.0, cybersecurity, connected devices, media and communications.
Towards the Future
Coherent Logix is adding a cloud-based capability for new customers, universities, and the Maker/open-source community to work with their development tools and hardware. With older von Neumann microprocessor architecture designs and today’s programmable hardware, the software development process is so tedious that it can take 24-36 months for a customer to develop a solution e.g., a WiFi router. Coherent Logix microprocessors, however, have C-programmability and use standard software development processes. They also offer a cycle-accurate simulation platform. These advantages enable Coherent Logix to build solutions in just six months and continue to reprogram or reconfigure as needed to support their product and customer roadmaps with new software-defined functions or as standards evolve. This, combined with the hardware/software co-design process the company uses to build their System on Chips (SoCs), brings the power of digital transformation to the design and use of digital processors – amplifying both the pace of innovation and the competitive advantages of Coherent Logix.
For the near future, Walt is striving towards building highly functioning, distributed teams to bring the most disruptive products to market he has worked on, i.e., a new class of low-power, reprogrammable, high-performance computing devices. Coherent Logix is enabling customers to “redefine hardware as software” (which is also the company’s tagline) to meet the market demand for the flexibility, extensibility, and scalability of software-defined hardware systems and their small SWaP requirements, ranging from space satellites to consumer devices. Coherent Logix’s HyperX architecture provides a paradigm shift in hardware-software co-design from embedded systems to the cloud and delivers a more cost-effective and scalable software-defined device strategy. With its compute and memory co-localized, an event-oriented, parallel processing fabric, low power profile, and C-programmability, this has a 2-4x improvement in the time it takes to develop and launch products. This multi-faceted value proposition extends product customer lifetime value economic models, increasing the ROI for its ODM and OEM partners and customers. Accomplishing these product revenue growths and customer-centric goals will lead naturally to the longer-term goal of positioning Coherent Logix for a successful market exit for its shareholders.
“The future requires low-power, high performance computing for next generation connected devices – it will be everywhere we find a sensor, a camera, a robot, or smart device. As large as the Space 2.0 revolution is, the terrestrial edge and embedded devices will eclipse it by orders of magnitude,” concludes Walt. “We must be as efficient with power as possible. It has a cost to our planet to produce, and it turns into heat when you use it. If we want to preserve our planet, smart everything must become smart, efficient everything.”
" I wanted Innovana to be agile and able to turn on a dime whenever needed to react quickly to our clients’ demands. That’s the level of responsiveness companies need to stay on the leading edge. "
Mitch McDermid
President & CEO
