By Rachel Chalmers
For a company which announced a new identity this week, SGI still finds it a bit of a struggle to convey just what it is that the company does. Once, characterizing Silicon Graphics was easy. The company made high-end graphics machines – the purple boxes that make dinosaurs, quips market development manager Beth Rogozinski. The chips were SGI MIPS microprocessors, the operating system was SGI’s Unix variant, Irix.
Those were the days. Now MIPS has been spun off and Cray Supercomputer acquired. SGI has accepted the overwhelming verdict of CAD/CAM ISVs and has brought out a Wintel line. Yet a year- long study by San Francisco’s Landor Associates found that most people still associate the company with purple boxes that do great graphics. So the company dumped its venerable name, which will live on as a mere product family. SGI now stands for (deep breath): servers, supercomputers and graphical workstations that enable breakthrough insights.
If that sounds like a mess, it might just be doing a good job of conveying the current state of SGI. The company is now offering three microprocessor architectures – Intel, Cray and MIPS – and four operating systems – NT, Linux, Cray’s UNICOS and Irix, which market development manager Mike Schaller assures us is not dead. Nor is there much overlap to speak of: Irix runs only on MIPS and NT, of course, only on Intel. (There’s no official MIPS port of Linux yet, but watch this space.) Add to that a project to unite the OpenGL graphics API with Microsoft’s DirectX toolkit, and you have what looks to the untrained eye like a set of opportunistic lunges at elusive markets.
Not so, say executives, pointing to the fact that 90% of AOL’s email runs on SGI Origin and legacy servers. So where, apart from those admittedly handsome purple boxes, is the linking theme? Visual computing, suggests Rogozinski. The way we communicate is moving from text-based to rich media, she explains. Hence all the email servers, right? It’s true that many of SGI’s vaunted customers – notably NZ Telecom, Sabre/Travelocity and @Home – are using the machines to handle high hit-rates. LucasFilm has SGI boxes running applications that have nothing to do with the images we see on screen. A lot of what we’re doing for LucasFilm is far more important than The Phantom Menace, Rogozinski said. Meanwhile, Crays are still selling into government, especially into projects like weapons research, we’re told. The company’s image problem is real. It’s just hard to see how all these businesses could be made to fit together, if at all.
SGI does have one approximate counterpart: Compaq since its acquisition of DEC. Both companies are supporting Wintel boxes alongside Unix servers on RISC architectures. But Compaq is a box-shifter that bought a Unix business, and not the other way around. True to its Unix workstation heritage, SGI still regards box-shifter as the deadliest of insults. It says all it has done is broadened its product range. You can imagine the howls of mirth that would follow if Apple had shipped Windows machines and offered the same excuse. Executives cite CEO Rick Belluzzo, who says: It’s a big ship and it takes a long time to turn it around. That’s true, if a trifle fatalistic. And heaven help you if there’s an iceberg in your path.
