- December 24, 2024 10:52 am
- California
David Duplisea took the reins at the Saint John Board of Trade just about ten years ago. Previous boards of Directors had discussed the possibility of partnering with the region’s Chambers and business associations to create a single organization. David’s first task as the CEO was to rebrand the legacy institution as a regional Chamber and merge four organizations into one from financial, by-laws, membership, and brand perspectives. The new organization, now known as The Saint John Region Chamber of Commerce, has successfully reinvented itself and serves the region and the province with an expanded membership and cohesive voice that speaks as one. They have added power to the business voices and not diluted them as was feared with the merger.
Cost controls, new technology, and innovation enhanced online processes, and a view to new revenue streams was critical as the new organization was reimagined. As social media became more and more popular as a means of networking and communication, many chambers and boards of trade found themselves becoming irrelevant from these perspectives.
he Saint John region Chamber was able to help insulate itself from these “disruptive technologies” by embracing and implementing them to attract and retain new members and business attention.
New revenue streams are critical to the survival of the Chamber. The Chamber was formed in 1819 and has successfully reimaged itself based on the changing needs of a dynamic business landscape.
Seminars, events, and conferences provide an opportunity to help members learn and adapt to new practices and have been increasing in terms of scope and value.
For example, the Saint John Region Chamber was the first Chamber to embrace the new Cannabis laws and partnered with local members to present the first World Cannabis Conference in Saint John, NB. Over 400 attendees from 11 countries learned about the new medical, educational, legal, marketing, and social ramifications. The Chamber was also instrumental in introducing policy positions to the government to implement laws and practices for this new sector.
Navigating the Pandemic
David and The Saint John Region Chamber of Commerce were able to pivot and reinvent themselves to serve the business community throughout the pandemic. They had already implemented a hybrid model where the staff could work from home and their offices. Two days before the actual lockdown occurred, David instituted a complete work from the home model for all staff.
Realizing that businesses and the community would need access to trusted and accurate information on a 24/7 basis, and with David’s background in information systems and management, The Chamber developed an Online Information Resources Centre. The day after the lockdown went into effect, the Information Centre went online. The Chamber provided access to government policies, regulations, important Covid information, and necessary PPE to keep staff safe. Through this, they were able to assist 5000 people and businesses every week. They heard on numerous occasions that this helped tremendously and provided comfort and relief in a hectic and confusing time.
As businesses pivoted and developed their new business models, the Chamber also provided an Online Marketplace that highlighted all these businesses and how to contact them. This service grew to include businesses of all sizes and types and was emulated throughout the region.
The Chamber continued to lobby hard, in conjunction with the other Chamber in NB, to enhance and increase the recovery initiatives, including expanding the wage subsidy from 10% to up to 75%, providing rent relief, and funding for those impacted by the pandemic.
Although in a pandemic, the Chamber continued to provide the community with a sense of normalcy by hosting a series of Mayoral Candidate Forums for the whole region during our municipal elections, pivoting to include virtual and in-person components.
“Many of our local businesses and leaders had worked hard and were able to pivot and survive the tough times so the Chamber recognized the importance of continuing with our Outstanding Business Awards ceremony,” says David. “As the longest standing business awards ceremony, it was important that we continue this tradition despite the realities that the pandemic had caused. An inventive virtual event, complete with an international children’s choir recognized community champions for their efforts, none of this recognition would have been possible without my amazing teams.”
Working towards Clients Productivity
Working with one of their members who had an idea that the Chamber could leverage the trend to get out of larger cities and work from here, the Chamber and USTATION launched an innovation program called Workcation, this “work from anywhere, live here” campaign was found on a pilot project basis, and has been successful with over 450 applicants. The program applicants visit and work in their region for four weeks, and they curate a personal experience based on their tastes, including sports, recreation, culture, and hospitality. The costs of the visits are subsidized up to 60%. Financial support from the Province of NB allowed them to launch this program. Currently, the Chamber has had visitors that are relocating here and others that are exploring their options. “There is now a waiting list. This “try before you buy” model now has the technology infostructure, best practices and learnings and data analysis that could allow it scale up for larger catchment area,” adds David.
The Chamber has also worked with the federal government and the Atlantic Chamber of Commerce to support local buying campaigns. Rather than create a new program that could dilute existing efforts, they decided to augment their efforts to increase the uptake and provide additional “jet fuel” to their campaigns. They have created a #LiftUpLocal campaign where the Chamber gathered together their regional economic development agencies, the city of SJ, and regional municipalities and helped fund activities such as a regional jazz festival designed to safely bring people back to a public venue to enjoy music. They have supported the “digital dollars” campaign implemented by our local Business Improvement Association. A famous farmers market was also helped to operate safely and help people feel safe as they venture out. This LiftUpLocal brand was attached to the Chamber’s regional activities, helped create a pride of place, and provided an incentive to keep their purchasing dollars local.
The biggest accomplishment of the Chamber under David’s leadership was to successfully reinvent this organization so that it was a vibrant part of the community and contributing on a national stage. The Chamber was awarded a silver medal finish in a national competition for new and innovative models that enhanced membership value when David presented the successful rebrand to a more diverse regional organization. Membership has stabilized and increased, and the organization is now in a financially sustainable position heading into the future.
“This past year we had the opportunity to return to our roots. We opened our new office in “The Chamber Building” located literally in the same space where we were formed 202 years ago,” elucidates David. “The Chamber has returned home, as a symbol of the strength and resiliency of the regions’ business community. The new space plays homage to our extraordinary past as one of the first business associations in the entire country.”
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.”
" The biggest accomplishment of the Chamber under David’s leadership was to successfully reinvent this organization so that it was a vibrant part of the community and contributing on a national stage. "
David Duplisea
CEO
