Six months under the charge of CEO Rick Belluzzo, and does Silicon Graphics Inc look more or less like Apple Computer Inc? More, we think. Like Apple, with which Belluzzo agrees there are some similarities, SGI’s new management has drastically cut back the number of products and markets it focuses on, closed operations, implemented a tight fiscal regime and has a brand new product line on the way. Moreover, Belluzzo told ComputerWire on a Merrill Lynch & Co call, management has realized that passion [for SGI] is important. Manufacturing, government and education, entertainment and media, energy, sciences and communications (including telcos) will be its key markets. The forthcoming Windows NT Visual PC desktop will be the low-end product for CAD, EDA, desktop publishing and education markets. The VisualPC will break the mold, SGI believes, by combining traditional system infrastructure with unique graphics and media functions. And it’s taken far too long to get it out, Belluzzo adds. Its competitive advantage will be offering highly integrated NT/Unix desktop product family. It is also readying a new graphics engine and CPUs. As far as the competition is concerned, Sun Microsystems Inc only does Unix while Hewlett-Packard Co’s Unix/NT strategy is fragmented and isn’t being leveraged, Belluzzo says. SGI is also looking at how to productize is ccNUMA, graphics and media technologies in forms such as chip- sets that can be licensed to third parties. It may have some leading technologies but marketing those has been woefully inadequate, Belluzzo observes. For now its will be Unix servers that fulfill strategic business analysis, internet data center and media serving markets. While the NT server market is growing in momentum Belluzzo says he doesn’t know how to build a scalable NT server today. He claims SGI is working with Microsoft Corp on scaling. Furthermore SGI’s not going head-on against Sun, HP and IBM Corp in traditional commercial markets such as ERP; that strategy would be death, says Belluzzo, I don’t want to be number seven in a market I want SGI to be number one. The company is currently redefining its supercomputing strategy by folding the traditional vector technologies into its Origin server lines because the current supercomputing model is bankrupt and it doesn’t work.
