Pat Host 
- Rob Renzoni took a brief hiatus from GovCon before returning to the industry
- The Hammerspace director of federal sales spent two years at Raytheon at 24 at Quantum
- He sat down with ExecutiveBiz to talk HPC, AI, data fabrics and company culture
Rob Renzoni doesn’t stay away from GovCon for long. The Hammerspace director of federal sales and Air Force electronic warfare technician veteran took a brief hiatus in his private sector career, which included two years at Raytheon and 24 years at Quantum, an IT services and consulting firm, to diversify into the worldwide media, entertainment and video surveillance markets.
But Renzoni missed the purpose and mission from his early exposure to the EW and special operations community. This, four years ago, attracted him back into GovCon with Hammerspace, where he’s leading AI, machine learning and high-performance computing initiatives.
Renzoni is proud to have raised three kids with his wife in the same house for over 20 years as he lacked that anchor as a child growing up. Renzoni is leading a big initiative at Hammerspace in helping the Pentagon deploy two data fabrics across multiple high-performance computing centers and better share data. Hammerspace was recently awarded a Cisco contract to deliver an AI factory for the DOW community, he said.
We caught up with Renzoni for a Spotlight interview to discuss deploying data orchestration in classified environments, maintaining shared sense of mission for employees who support, but don’t touch, federal contracts, the next AI and HPC software capability on Hammerspace’s roadmap and keeping a consistent company culture as its GovCon business grows.
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ExecutiveBiz: Your customer list reportedly includes the DOW and the national labs. What’s different about deploying data orchestration in a classified DOW environment versus an academic research setting?
Rob Renzoni: I think security is top of mind, second only to the complexity of navigating the different personalities within any individual agency. As we’re bridging the gap between different data silos and platforms, we often encounter traditional silos that have been built up over time. You have to navigate each one because each mission owner has responsibility for their own environment.
When you try to connect them, everyone has to work together. That’s been one of the challenges.
Beyond that, the security requirements keep evolving and we have to stay out in front of those changes because we’re an integral part of the technology stack as data flows through it.
EBiz: With teams spread globally and a headquarters culture centered in Silicon Valley, how do you maintain a shared sense of mission for employees who may never touch a federal contract directly, but whose work supports one?
Renzoni: For Hammerspace, that’s pretty easy. It starts at the top. Our CEO, David Flynn, grew up in that environment by spending a lot of time early in his career at the national labs. Later, when he moved into the corporate market and became CEO of Fusion-io, bringing solid state drives to market, he partnered closely with the intelligence and hyperscale communities. He also built strong relationships within the DOW that we’re still leveraging today at Hammerspace.
Beyond that, Hammerspace is anchored in the HPC community, which has always fostered strong public-private relationships. It’s a relatively small world of people who dedicate their lives to these missions, whether that’s cancer research, weather forecasting, or supporting the warfighter.
My job as head of federal is to ensure our roadmaps and our people are aligned with the needs of our mission partners. So it’s not hard to keep everybody on task.
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EBiz: What’s the next software capability on your roadmap that’s most relevant to federal AI and high-performance computing customers specifically?
Renzoni: We have a number of new capabilities. This is the time of year when we’re launching all kinds of new things because we have multiple big events to end the year. There will be a lot of news over the next few weeks.
But the capability I’m most excited about is something we’re calling the AI Data Accelerator. Data should not be the bottleneck in any AI processing stack. We’ve created several ways to optimize graphics processing unit data utilization, ensuring that the expensive GPUs everyone is clamoring to buy don’t sit idle. They need to stay fed with the data they require.
This Hammerspace capability can have a significant impact on AI infrastructure costs. We’re seeing hardware prices rise, so anything we can do on the software side to alleviate that pressure is very helpful to the mission. After all, agency budgets are set on an annual basis, not according to the changing demands of the corporate market.
We’ve recently deployed this capability with one of our partners in the IC and it’s truly accelerated their ability to process data exponentially faster, with a direct impact on mission needs. It’s also very easy to deploy on existing hardware that the agency probably already owns.
EBiz: Hammerspace grew up serving hyperscalers, Hollywood and research institutions before deepening its presence in government. How do you keep the culture consistent as federal sales become a bigger share of the business?
Renzoni: The truth is that consistency comes from the people. We’re not one of those tech companies built around a marketing team. We have a great marketing team, don’t get me wrong, but at the core of our culture is seasoned engineering talent. Our CFO has been a Linux kernel maintainer for multiple decades and we have a very strong bench of people with intellectual property expertise in what we do.
Their ability to solve complex problems is at the forefront of our culture. Hammerspace federal’s growth reinforces the company’s identity: mission-critical workloads drive better engineering results. The stronger security and other innovations we develop for federal customers can also carry over into the commercial side of the business quite naturally. That creates a unifying element.
As the federal leader, I’m a steward of the company’s culture, not the owner of a separate entity. We’re truly one team, all swimming in the same direction.
