SGI is a goner
YESTERDAY, in a rather awkward turn of events, Silicon Graphics filed for Chapter 11 for the second time in three years... (and no, it isn't an April Fool's Day fib). The firm was then quickly picked up by little Rackable Systems, who rode in on its shiny server cabinet and took ze damsel in distress for a fair $25 million.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
SGI is estimated to have over half a billion dollars worth of debt and, as far as we've been told, Rackable will be taking the brunt of the debt. The money from the acquisition will go straight into creditor's pockets.
The ailing company made just $82 million worth of revenues this last quarter, a clear sign of danger if you compare to a few years back when it was raking in dough in the billions.
The acquisition will, however, allow Rackable to fend off the rising tide that is Dell, hopefully, while opening the door on some juicy new business - government contracts (Heaven knows how much that 51,200-processor Altix system cost NASA...) and Hollywoodland. Staff reductions are pretty much inevitable, as about half of the company's 1600 staff are sales personnel.
SGI's current predicament has been long in the coming, In May 2006 the firm first filed for Chapter 11 but failed to dig itself out of the hole when it jumped on the USS Itanic. Needless to say, sales were not stellar. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Now this is the combo that IBM should be buying along with Sun Micro. With all the IP that SGI has particularly in NUMA design and high speed interconnects, not to mention the juicy government contracts (the FED's are going to need all the computing horsepower they can get to crunch all those numbers dealing with our debt) AND Rackable's clientel PLUS all the software IP that Sun has, IBM would become an even more formidable opponent to the likes of HP and Dell.
I don't know why this makes me sad, but it does. I've never owned or used an SGI system, but since the mid-late 90s they were like a mythical beast in my tech world... rumblings in the distance. When they ported GLQuake to SGI, I thought that if I ever had hundreds of thousands of extra dollars, I would build an SGI quake arcade in the large home that I would also have if I had that kind of money (don't even get me started on the CAVE port of Quake 2! Who wouldn't have given a body part for that rig??)
Oh SGI, we hardly knew ye.
And, come on, Infinite Reality is one of the coolest names for a computer ever.
@Owain: Same here, the mighty SGI fall makes everyone sad :( Couldn't earn enough money in time to get myself a SGI. :(
@The Sentinel: IBM should really buy out Rackable now, before anyone does. If SGI is going to sale, I would rather see IBM pickup SGI rather than anyone else.
I think the most to blame is the MARKETing people. They narrow the target too much, and tagged the price too high. How many advanced research lab in the world? And how many of them are willing to be ripped off by your way overpriced machine?
The same thing happened to IBM too. Look at the OS/2 time, they targeted OS/2 to corporate ONLY, and tagged the OS with a skyhigh price. Look what happen?
If I'm IBM/SGI/Rackable, I would fire those marketing people and black list them forever.
I still vividly remember SIGGRAPH in the mid 90's, where SGI was the king of the show and I was like a kid in dreamland. I toyed at the time with the idea to buy one of their boxes but it was too expensive for me.
Their business model just could not handle the onslaught of fast PCs. Indeed sad.
This kinda put a dampener on April fools day. How the mighty have fallen!
From the proud owner of an Indy & Octane2 V12
"half of the company's 1600 staff are sales personnel"
Those high-spending customers must really need a lot of attention, or is each supercomputer rolled into place on the customer site in Ancient Egyptian style?
Although not mentioned in my first post, I too am quite crestfallen over SGI's demise. I once worked on an Octane. "Sweet dreams are made of this"!
Yet a lot of you may yet have an SGI box in your home. Look in your attic or garage or the back of your kid's closet from hell.....
...and dust off that old Nintendo N64. Except for the Nintendo OS it is SGI chippery through and through.
Pop out the motherboard and put it under glass to display those two honking big MIPS chips; the left one being the 64bit MIPS R4300 CPU and the big one in the center is the SGI designed Reality Engine GPU.
There are plenty of those on the cheap on EBAY and unlike most SGI boxen, they're still useful for home use.
SGI already gave everything away. The NUMA patents to Intel in exchange for Itanic. OpenGL to Microsoft in exchange for Fahrenheit. Graphics patents to nVidia in exchange for ???. Only thing left for RACK was a carcass.