The financial tangle that Silicon Graphics Inc’s managed to get itself into has prompted the company to reorganize its corporate structure and product units, leading to the resignations of CFO Stanley Meresman and desktop SVP Mike Ramsay. SGI’s poor third quarter showed that the company is still trying to digest its February 1996 Cray Research Inc acquisition as well as complete and end-to-end product transition and at the same time as trying to keep Intel Corp and RISC system vendors from capturing the lucrative graphics and imaging markets SGI has made largely its own. Yesterday SGI put Cray chief Robert Ewald in charge of a single Computer Systems organization which spans desktops to Cray supercomputers. A combined sales organization was created soon after SGI bought Cray, with an integrated product strategy falling into place last October. Instead of discrete desktop, graphics, scalable server and Cray product units reporting to chief executive Ed McCracken, the company plans to put its server business – which grew 90% from the third quarter of its financial 1996 to the third quarter of 1997 – center stage. The Computer Systems organization will comprise an enterprise server group run by SVP, general manager and one-time Mips Technologies chief Ron Bernal; desktop and graphics by SVP and general manager David Orton who was previously in charge of servers; Cray by president Irene Qualters who is also SVP technical computing; and manufacturing, run by SVP Steve Goggiano. A single core operations group will oversee administration, headed by SVP William Kelly, formerly general counsel. Kelly assumes former CFO Meresman’s duties until a replacement for him is found. John Sullivan, Cray’s general counsel, fills Kelly’s former role. Service and support is being put into a single customer and professional services organization run by SVP Ken Coleman, formerly head of administration. Gary Lauer, EVP worldwide operations; CTO Forest Baskett; and Mips president John Bourgion plus the Silicon Interactive Group comprised of the Alias/Wavefront software and Web products units will continue to report to McCracken.
