Total Impact Teams Up With Minnesota Firm

His company may not be a household name now, but just wait a little while, says Glenn Churchman, chief executive of Camarillo-based Total Impact.

The entrepreneur is confident that Total Impact, a manufacturer of multiprocessor systems for high-power computer processing, will be heard from many times in years to come. Its specialty, providing systems for fast, clean transmission of data, is very much in demand.

As evidence, the company signed a five-year agreement with General Dynamics Information Systems of Minnesota to develop large-scale multiprocessor systems for computer defense customers.

General Dynamics Information Systems is a division of Virginia-based General Dynamics Corp., a provider of information processing systems for air, land, sea and space uses. The company also markets information management services to the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. allies.

The agreement provides General Dynamics with exclusive rights to market and sell Total Impact’s products to the Department of Defense and to members of the foreign military defense industry. The contract also calls for General Dynamics to purchase from Total Impact about $2 million in multiprocessing boards this year.

“It gives us entry into the worldwide defense market,” Churchman said.

“We have a commercial application with this same product that is equally opportunistic for customers,” he said. “We’re taking to the desktop level the ability to run an application that requires extreme processing power.”

The technology, which compresses information so that it can be transmitted over limited bandwidths, is used commercially for video conferencing, 3-D graphics, desktop video and medical imaging.

“What’s happening, more and more, is [the industry] is putting together high process power-demanding applications--we’re transmitting large files of data, whether that is 3-D or multimedia,” Churchman said.

“The smaller you can compress data, the faster you can get it to the end user and with higher resolution,” he said. “Look at the Internet. You click on something and download and it can come very slowly to you. We can create a situation where it gets you the [data] much faster and in much larger size.”

In addition to its contract with General Dynamics Information Systems, Total Impact will be teaming with four leaders in the digital video industry.

“All of these companies are at the top of the heap in processing digital video and getting it out to the end user,” he said. “Bundling with our product is enabling that capability.”