Giving Back in Unprecedented Times

Back in November 2019, I wrote a blog about our technology partners and their consistent generosity in giving back to their communities. Fast forward six months later and their generosity continues to shine during this time of disruption and uncertainty.

In our current environment where stay-at-home mandates have greatly limited our daily routines and activities, the increased demand for digital products and services from tech companies to connect customers’ remote work teams—not to mention the transitional challenges that these tech companies themselves had to deal with to convert their own teams to working from home—might have proven to be a distraction from “giving back.” So it is immensely gratifying to see that our partners and the tech community, far from being distracted or deterred by an overall economic downturn, have in fact stepped up to help those who are struggling right now and those who are working to alleviate  COVID-19.

Our partner Cisco continues to be a standard bearer not only in the Silicon Valley, but globally, for its generosity and deep commitment to corporate philanthropy. Cisco has committed a staggering $225 million in products and funds to the local and global coronavirus response and providing relief to families through investments in telehealth, childcare for first responders, virtual education and numerous other outlets. Cisco is also partnering with medical centers and labs to find a cure for COVID-19.

Additionally, Cisco has contributed $2 million toward a $9 million fund along with other tech companies for relief to The Santa Clara County Homelessness Prevention System's emergency assistance program for county residents who have lost income as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

Giving back is one of Groupware’s core values and in our efforts to make a contribution during this current crisis, we recently offered the complimentary use of our DGX-1 GPU farm consisting of multiple NVIDIA V100 (32GB) GPUs as a resource to our customers who specialize in drug discovery for COVID-19. NVIDIA itself also recently announced an offering to coronavirus researchers of 90-days free access to Parabricks, its GPU-accelerated genome analysis toolkit.

I salute the innovative and thoughtful mindset that NVIDIA has shown as well in enlisting its immense gaming community to fight COVID-19. Recently the company encouraged its PC gamers to donate their computers’ processing power to the Folding@home app which will apply the power towards projects that help researchers understand coronavirus.

NVIDIA, along with our partners AWS, Google Cloud, HPE, IBM, Intel and Microsoft, are among numerous tech companies who have joined the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing (HPC) consortium -- an initiative launched by the White House to make supercomputers accessible to researchers working to combat the coronavirus.

Another impactful and popular way in which our partners have stepped up their contributions in this time of fighting COVID-19 is through matching gift programs. As part of our core value of Giving Back, Groupware implemented a corporate matching program many years ago. Through these philanthropic programs, companies financially match the donations their employees make to nonprofit organizations. I have seen more organizations institute such programs in an effort to combat COVID-19. Some of our other partners have significantly increased their matching gifts during this time of crisis, fostering an environment of mutual “giving back” between the companies and their employees. Our partner VMware recently announced it is doubling its matching gift limit for 2020 to enable employees to better support their communities during this time of uncertainty and increased needs.

All of the above is just a small snapshot of what the tech community is doing. Throughout this crisis, I’ve never been more honored to be associated with partners who have responded to unprecedented challenges in their own companies and in the world. As business routines have been disrupted, to see partners and the technology community not forget about the spirit of giving back and even doubling down to make a difference to help those in need during this crisis, is not only humbling but makes me very proud to be part of this community.

 “You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.” -John Wooden-