Silicon Graphics Inc always seemed to be among the best-placed of the smaller companies gearing up to fight the multimedia wars – and yesterday the company won a giant leg-up when AT&T Corp announced that it would be forming a joint venture company with the Mountain View high-performance graphics workstation king. The venture, Interactive Digital Solutions, is equally owned by AT&T’s Network Systems unit and Silicon Graphics, and its mission is to develop large-scale, interactive video server systems for telephone company networks and cable television systems. It will develop software to integrate Silicon Graphics’ MIPS RISC-based media server and system software with key elements of public networks, including such AT&T products as high-speed switches, synchronous transport, broadband access systems and network operations systems. No financial terms were disclosed but the agreement is an enormous boost to Silicon Graphics’s ambitions because AT&T has already been given big multimedia video-on-demand network systems integration contracts by the Pacific Bell subsidiary of Pacific Teleis Group Inc, Bell Atlantic Corp, Southern New England Telephone Co and Southwestern Bell Corp. Silicon Graphics is already in the driving seat at Time Warner Inc’s interactive cable television network trial in Orlando, Florida, where it is supplying servers and other equipment, and is also to to equip Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp’s video trials; Electronic Data Systems has also signed to sell Silicon Graphics servers. AT&T plans to install a string of video servers in its long-distance network as part of its planned transmission service for telephone and cable companies. The only question is where the agreement will leave AT&T’s internal server development: last year, it was talking about a video server that as well as using optical or magnetic disk would use a vast box of memory chips as cache to store complete movies when viewers request them (CI No 2,183).
