Picture: THINKSTOCK
Picture: THINKSTOCK

Related articles

In this article

THE business relationship between technology specialist Poynting and small startup company CrunchYard illustrates how big business can lift enterprising and innovative small businesses to greater heights.

For years there has been much complaining in the business community that few big companies are empowering small enterprises to prosper, but the Poynting and CrunchYard partnership debunks this myth.

Centurion-based Poynting is an antenna manufacturer which designs and manufactures specialised wideband antennas and related radio frequency products used in electronic warfare, frequency spectrum monitoring, test and measurement, communication and other specialised markets.

They also create applications for system integration, frequency spectrum regulation and home-security markets.

CrunchYard offers high-performance computing that extends an engineering simulation service over the internet on a pay-per-use basis. The company’s service has become a key ingredient to Poynting’s high productivity, innovation and efficient operations.

Poynting Antennas chief technology officer and head of engineering Chris Vale says that due to the demands of their clients they are forced to work with the best suppliers only and CrunchYard fits the bill. "We are hard on our suppliers. We seek high-quality components," he says.

"(This is) one of the reasons we ship overseas (to places including) the US, UK and Germany (with their) extremely exacting standards. Our demands on our suppliers are fairly dire."

CrunchYard has helped Poynting at critical times to meet its targets. "It may happen that you need to conceptualise, develop and ship a solution within a short period of time. It’s so much about service — in engineering, service becomes the key thing," Mr Vale says.

By using CrunchYard’s supercomputing cloud solution, Poynting engineers do not have to wait for resources to become available. Small problems can be run in parallel, Mr Vale says.

In addition, large complex simulations and optimisation problems can also be attempted. Its relationship with CrunchYard allows Poynting to utilise its designer’s time to the maximum and to explore the design space extensively in a short amount of time.

As the various design concepts are refined via simulation and developed, cross-pollination occurs between the concepts and the designer gains insights into the problem from a variety of standpoints. The CrunchYard service then allows engineers to concentrate on solving problems rather than waiting for resources.

"Poynting does antenna design but they don’t have the simulation power to make their design work fast, so that’s where we come in," CrunchYard CEO Reiner Dreyer says. "If you can shorten simulation time, it becomes cost effective and gives them competitive advantage over their competition."

By making CrunchYard services available online, companies can access engineering simulation at a small portion of the cost of doing it themselves.

...

SETTING up and maintaining simulation resources is prohibitively expensive, Mr Dreyer says. The costs include infrastructure (the computers), infrastructure set up (air-conditioning and a stable power supply), maintenance (manpower to run the system) and the licensing of the simulation software.

But with CrunchYard offering a cloud-based system on a "pay per use" basis, large organisations can budget for each project more effectively without the large capital outlay a cluster requires.

Dreyer says the geosciences services department at Anglo American is using the CrunchYard platform to run its prospecting programme, which is often referred to in the geosciences as the H3DTD code.

CrunchYard’s platform has helped Anglo American employees to access a large amount of computing data, solving large problems that single desktop machines will never cope with.

"The beauty of the system is that it can be done from any location with a standard internet access," Mr Dreyer says.

For CrunchYard, the relationship with Poynting has extended the use of its technology to the US, potentially opening a huge new market for the small startup. Poynting recently announced the acquisition of an American company, Antenna Research Associates (ARA).

Poynting, which has had limited sales success in the US, is now poised to make significant inroads in that market. Its immediate goal is to establish a larger footprint. ARA is a world-class supplier of radio frequency and antenna systems to, predominantly, the US military and homeland security.

The successful, innovative relationship between Poynting and CrunchYard comes at a time when, across the globe, innovation is being viewed as a catalyst for economic growth.

In 2013 the Global Innovation index — compiled after a survey of 143 economies around the world, using 81 indicators to gauge both the innovation capabilities and measurable results of new technology — found that innovation is a key cog of economic growth and development.

...

THE government’s National Development Plan (NDP) aims to transform the South African economy by, among others, increasing competitiveness and innovation.

The Department of Trade and Industry’s support programme for industrial innovation is designed to promote technology development by providing financial assistance for the development of innovative products or processes.

It is focused specifically on the development phase, which begins at the conclusion of basic research and ends at the point when a preproduction prototype has been produced.

The government argues that while the global economic outlook has improved moderately, SA cannot rely on external developments to alleviate domestic growth constraints.

The NDP urges the development of collaborative partnerships across SA — and the one between Poynting and CrunchYard is a good prototype for using a partnership to grow businesses.