Bob Bishop discusses SGI's refocus in MunichMunich 10 December 2000 Visiting Europe, Bob Bishop, SGI's Chairman and CEO, presented the results of the company's restructuring and refocusing. Back to its roots, SGI sees its single mission in supplying the technical and creative communities with high end and high-performance visualisation computers. The big data is connecting these markets. He additionally presented the MIPS and Intel IA-64 roadmap of the new servers and the cooperation with SUSE in Germany.
Although it was a short-dated press conference, it was possible to participate in the meeting with Bob Bishop. He mentioned that after a silent period, in which SGI restructured and refocused its business, now the company can present the results of all those discussions. The only foci now are big data problems from the beginning to the end, producing, storing, accessing, distribute and analyse for example with visualisation tools. He expects that HPC and visualisation come together and presented some big data examples, satellite data 1 TB/day or in a hospital all the images give an other 1 TB/day. In film production more 50 TB/film and all participant in the production have to access this. These industries need scaleable, real time computing, powerful compression/decompression on the fly.
Bob Bishop declared that SGI's customers love their focus. SGI addresses this 34 bio. US$ market, which will grow to 44 bio US$ in the next five years. Actually, SGI has a share of 2.2 bio US$ in this market. The total computer market has a size of 900 bio US$.
The core of most enterprises lie in their activities and tasks, building cars, exploration and bioinformatics for example. Now SGI focuses on pure mission, pure core. An other decision was to add all services, consulting, services, systems integration and project management. He said:" The transformation and realignments over this summer brought us a new portfolio of products. The synergistic value has set us on a fast, clear path. In Germany SGI is strong in automotive and aerospace industry. Now SGI approaches the media industry - integration with the Internet, broad band Internet with media content: Telcos, ISPs and ASPs. Bob Bishop mentioned: "The opportunities are enormous". The proprietary, SGI operating system Irix on MIPS platform is mature, scaleable, etc. Linux will be set on SGI's Intel track - they will not support it on MIPS platforms. Actually this operating system has an entry level strategy. It is emerging on Intel, IA-32 and IA-64, but it needs a lot of years to get a higher scalability, realtime and mission critical. SGI offers a common API from MIPS Irix to Intel chips, which results I a common system. Bishop openly discussed that Thorvald will direct the Linux future, not SGI, the same is true with Intel and its IA-64 - they direct it not SGI. The next day SGI announced that it cooperates closely with SUSE, the German Linux distributor and consulting services. Together they will bring Linux up to a higher level of performance. SUSE brings up the kernel to higher scalability, the technical application enterprise level, realtime and mission critical - leading edge Linux. But Bishop could not tell the exact time table. SGI is the catalyst for the Top50 ISVs, to port their software on Linux platforms. Linux will not be there very quickly for mission critical but within the next five years Bishop expects 50% MIPS and 50% Intel business.
In the discussion participants mentioned that the MIPS processor is rather slow compared to the competition. Bishop replied that it is better to get 45% of the performance out of 400 MHz MIPS instead getting 25% out of 700 MHz high-end systems. Next quarter the 500 MHz MIPS version will be rolled out, in the same year the 600 MHz processors. As SGI owns the intellectual property of the MIPS chip, the graphics and the ccNUMA technology, it has the option to integrate them into one chip. Bishop believes that the Origin 3000 will be the VAX of the next years. The machine made a leap in architectural performance and the brick technology. This allows to transfer the processor bricks from MIPS and Irix to a IA-64 and Linux brick. It will be possible to partition a 512 processor system anywhere between MIPS and IA-64. At SARA in Amsterdam SGI installed two 512-processor systems with shared memory connected in a cluster.
In September 2001 IA-64 will be in the market with big systems, in April smaller machines will be installed. Then we can swap the bricks. Bob Bishop covered this topic too. He expects that SGI will be profitable in the second half of the fiscal year, which ends in June 2001. In the last quarter SGI was unable to ship big systems, as the ceramic based, customised ASIC caused problems because of the ceramic material. All the other vendors like Sun and IBM had the same problem. They shipped 77 Origin 3000 last quarter, smaller systems. Now they deliver bigger configurations, ten with 128 processors and for example 1024 processor machines to the NASA, US Army and Airforce.
One system, 48 processor Origin 3000, in the risk monitoring market, an analytical application, gave our customer a profit of 40 million US$ within 60 days. Now he ordered 300 processors. The question concerning the low stock share, he answered that they after their restructuring in silence, they now will discuss the new SGI with the analysts.
This quarter SGI will deliver the first Onyx 3000.
Uwe Harms |
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