SHI Emerges As AI All-Star With A Breakthrough HPE Private Cloud Smart City Solution At Nvidia GTC

“These are meaningful benefits to the tune of millions of dollars of productivity gains and potentially hundreds – If not thousands of lives saved - for early stage wildfire prevention and detection,” said SHI Vice President of Advanced Growth Technologies Jack Hogan.

SHI International, the $16 billion solution provider behemoth, is taking bows as an AI all-star with a groundbreaking HPE Private Cloud AI smart city solution for Vail, Colorado, that is in the spotlight this week at Nvidia’s GTC conference.

The AI solution, which was put together in just four months with SHI’s unique ‘Imagine, Experiment, and Adopt’ AI solutions faster methodology, is already bringing big benefits to the town of Vail. That includes an early wildfire detection capability powered by an AI-based video fire alert system and a Section 508 disability website compliance solution that was put together in several weeks and saved the town what was anticipated to be three years of manpower to meet regulatory requirements.

The Vail solution comes with SHI mounting a full court AI public sector sales press to deliver tangible citizen benefits to local, state and city governments and their constituents.

“These are meaningful benefits to the tune of millions of dollars of productivity gains and potentially hundreds – if not thousands of lives saved – for early-stage wildfire prevention and detection,” said SHI Vice President of Advanced Growth Technologies Jack Hogan (pictured above) in an interview with CRN. “These are areas that we are impacting in such big ways that they become repeatable (for other public sector entities).”

To that point, SHI has released a Section 508 compliance solution with HPE, Nvidia and ISV Kamiwaza based on the Vail AI breakthrough.

Hogan and SHI Senior Vice President of Public Sector Sales Denise Collison both credited legendary SHI founder and CEO Thai Lee with providing the huge investment that is powering the SHI AI revolution.

The hefty investment – made with the intent to put SHI at the forefront of AI solutions revolution – includes over 160 AI employees including data scientists, full-stack AI software engineers, solution engineer and architects and a $20 million-plus state-of-the-art SHI AI and Cyber Labs facility in Piscataway, New Jersey, which was opened in April. That lab investment included a retrofit of the company’s data center that includes three different kinds of liquid cooling technology. “This is a momumental AI environment that we can bring to customers to work through the Imagine, Experiment and Adopt (AI) process,” said Hogan.

In addition, Lee recently made a strategic investment in NStarX, a Ballwin, Mo.-based AI software development company that has provided SHI with unique AI intellectual property. That includes SHI AI Retriveval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, a multimodal AI chat agent, an AI fraud detection solution, an agentic AI event planner and an AI-based digital AI ambassador. “All of those were developed with the resources we have with the investment in NStarX,” said Hogan.

The ‘Reach, Relationships And Technical Prowess’ To Be Successful

Lee firmly believed that SHI had the “reach, relationships and technical prowess to deliver these full stack (AI) solutions,” said Hogan. Now that vision is paying off in AI solutions for public sector and commercial customers.

“Why can SHI be successful in AI? It’s because we are focusing the power of our 7,000 employees, our connections with 17,000 customers, our $16 billion a year in revenue, we’re focusing that now on AI,” said Hogan. “Now is the time to go all in on AI. The world has been exposed to it but they have to be brought to a place where AI can be delivered in a safe way.”

Customers have moved from a “fear of missing out” (FOMO) on AI to a “fear of messing up” (FOMU) with AI, said Hogan. SHI’s state of the art AI lab and its ‘Imagine, Experiment, and Adopt’ methodology is squarely focused on making sure that customers gain AI benefits in record time.

“The strategy and approach we have with Imagine, Experiment and Adopt ensures that customers are successful prototyping before they move to full scale production,” said Hogan.

In the case of the Vail smart city application, SHI first met with Vail officials in early July, which led to the SHI “Imagine, Experiment and Adopt” workshop in August, said Hogan. That workshop identified over 20 use cases and refined it to the four most impactful use cases.

The initial meeting with Vail came with HPE and HPE Unleash ISV partner Kamiwaza, an automation and real-time decision-making software provider, singling out SHI as the right partner to do the complex integration of the full stack solution.

In fact, SHI acted as an AI quarterback of sorts bringing together a wide array of ecosystem partners to bring the Vail AI solution to market.

Besides HPE and Kamiwaza, the ecosystem players involved included Nvidia; Blackshark.ai, which makes geospatial AI and early fire detection solutions; ProHawk AI, an enhanced compute vision platform; and Vaidio, a real-time video intelligence and behavior analytics application.

SHI is building its AI Imagine, Experiment and Adopt sales pipeline with a focus on smart city, smart hospitality and smart sports as top areas of focus.

The Ability To Make A Big AI Impact Quickly

Collison, a 31-year SHI veteran, said the AI public sector focus on state, local, higher education as well as the federal government is resonating with the SHI public sector sales team because of the ability to make a big impact quickly.

“We’re always looking for the solutions to bring to market that will be a 20 percent spend or lift for the government – which is constrained with resources and budget – but will have an 80 percent impact on the government itself and constituents,” said Collison.

Collison said public sector customers are benefiting from the SHI Imagine, Experiment and Adopt methodology. “In the case of AI a lot of early models are failing because they are not following the exact framework” that SHI has brought to customers, she said.

The SHI model provides customers a “safe and secure sandbox” they can develop AI solutions with knowledgeable AI talent that can make sure the “data is ready and the model will work and then move to adoption,” said Collison.

A Big AI Procurement Advantage For SHI

A big advantage for SHI is its robust procurement capabilities with local, state and federal government contract vehicles it holds as a leading public sector solution provider. “All of our AI efforts are wrapped around the procurement vehicles and contracts that we hold which are very expansive and provide a route to market for our customers,” Collison said. “That is a big differentiator in the market.”

In fact, Collison said without the right public sector procurement contracts, customers are left stranded. “This has to be built on having the right procurement contracts,” she said. “That means bidding and winning these various contracts whether they are cooperative contracts or direct to customer contracts. We have a large foundational pool of these contracts that allow our customers to come and buy these solutions and services from us.”

That said, Collison noted, that public sector contracts need to be modernized for the AI era. “It is still lagging,” she said. “We are providing thought leadership around this as we possibly can. This is an area that could propel some of the much-needed changes in public sector procurement to allow for even more rapid adoption of these AI services in a safe and compliant way for public entities.”

Also driving the public sector AI sales momentum is the access to top-notch AI development talent. That is no small matter in public sector where budget constraints are a gating factor. “The extended team of resources we can bring to bear for public sector customers is having a huge impact,” Collison said.

In addition to providing critical AI talent to the public sector, SHI is also co-creating certification classes to enable public sector talent, said Collison. “We are trying to help them build their own talent,” she said. “We understand the talent gap and we are trying to bring that certification and enablement to them.”

SHI is also working with leading universities like Rutgers, Princeton and others to create internship programs to provide students hands-on AI education. “We are also trying to build that talent pool in joint collaboration with educational institutions in New Jersey,” she said. “Our plan is to bring that internship program out to other institutions throughout the country.”

At the heart of the SHI smart cities public sector sales model is a razor-sharp focus on safer communities, easier access to government services and more efficient communities in the areas such as traffic management and waste management, said Collison. “It is better operational efficiency leading to a high reduction in cost,” she said.

“Those are the big things that government agencies and cities and towns are looking to accomplish,” she said. “What we have done, along with our partners, is try to develop use cases that address exactly those things. These are wedge solutions that are scalable so as cities and towns need to accomplish additional things they just snap those into this platform so they can continue to reap the benefits (of AI).”

Collison, a 31-year SHI veteran, said SHI CEO Lee’s leadership is powering the SHI AI revolution. “Thai is willing to invest in resources and technology where she sees it will an impact on our customers,” she said. “That is where Thai puts her money. This is another example of her doing that early and in a big way to make sure that we are meeting our customers where they are at. It feels good to work for a company that is thinking like that from a customer perspective and then is willing to put the money behind it.”

Collison said the big impact SHI is having as an AI sales leader is fueling her and the public sector sales team. “Being able to watch the ideas that our partners and SHI have had and then bringing them to market and seeing them put into action is energizing me as a sales leader and a citizen,” she said. “We are seeing the impact we can have not just in Vail but in the greater landscape of this country as we roll these AI solutions out to more and more entities.”

A Role Model For How To Succeed In The AI Market

HPE Vice President of Global Hybrid Solutions Ulrich ‘Uli’ Seibold called SHI a “role model” for its ability to act as an AI quarterback, pulling together all the ISV relationships along with the consulting and integration capabilities to make it happen.

“What they provided on their home turf is the managed service, the integration service, they bring the ecosystem together, doing part of the consulting service,” he said. “I would say they are a role model. What we are doing in all our enablement workshops is talking with our partners and distributors, leveraging them to build an ecosystem. You cannot be fast enough to do all of it by yourself. You need to go into a partnership.”

Ultimately, SHI is “removing a lot of the friction” that has been holding customers back from adopting AI solutions, said Hogan. “AI is moving at such a fast pace that it is mind blowing to the customers we serve,” he said. “They are feeling though as they are becoming irrelevant or behind. So SHI’s approach here is to consult all along the process to resolve the middle mile of delivery that is slowing companies down in their adoption of AI and making them feel further and further behind. We are trying to accelerate that at the speed of light.”