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Alias In Acquisition Talks With Private Equity Firm
TeachingMachines writes "Alias, the makers of the venerable Maya 3D animation and effects software, have announced their possible sale to an unnamed 3rd party, described as a 'leading private equity investment firm'. Alias is currently owned by SGI, and the transaction is still considered to be tentative. I, for one, hope that SGI holds onto Alias, as in its current state it is arguably the best 3D modelling and animation suite available, and it is available for Linux. Cross your fingers..."
There were rumors of apple buying 3dStudio back in December 2003. I couldn't see that happen because there is no current OSX Port. For apple to add that software to their Pro apps it would take quite a bit of development before being able to add that feather to their cap. That rumor must have confused 3dstudio with Alias Maya???
To curb piracy of their full value product, they released a Personal Learn Edition that made all the features of the full product available
While I think the reasoning behing the Personal Learning Edition was great, they implemented it poorly.
I developed an interest in 3D during uni, and explored 3Dsmax, lightwave, etc.
I was excited when I saw the PLE, so I grabbed it with the intention of learning.
No such luck.
The watermark on any finished product is a fine idea, but they place a huge watermark (and not exactly a subtle, transparent one) across the entire modelling view, which makes using the product for longer than about 20 minutes impossible unless you want a spliting headache.
This actually steered me away from Maya, so I ended up sticking with 3dsmax for my uni subjects.
buy sgi stock, it is very cheap. sgi may be selling alias because they need the cash. lately, their stock price has been rising and should it rise some more they may reconsider. (don't take stock buying advice from me, IANA Stock Broker.)
no, i don't work for them, but i used to use their computers in 1998 and 1999. when i left that job, i borrowed the manual to the O2.
i bought some of their stock. when i tell people about it, i say that it is was an emotional buy.
andrew
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Alias hasn't made much sense for SGI since PC's and Mac's became equal to or better than SGI graphics workstations. I'm willing to bet that over 80% of Alias sales are to customers using Mac's and PC's, not SGI systems. I'm just happy this is making the stock go up. I've got a lot of shares left from when they layed me off a year ago that might actually be worth some money now!
I just visited their website. I wanted to see if you were wrong. These are my thoughts on a quick browsing looking for a meaty workstation.
They have beautiful workstations. Admittedly my only use of IRIX has been on Computones or NAS* boxes.
They did not have prices on the site. That means i cannot afford it if i have to ask. Maybe the Saudi Arabia linux club can, I cannot.
They obviously cater to a niche of people I never get to meet. I see more people with a need to run SUN machines than SGI.
No offence to SGI, I really loved their products, but sadly, I think they are a sinking ship. A few years ( perhaps even just a year back ) when Alias renamed itself from Alias Wavefront to just alias, and moved prices from 7500$ per unit to like 2000$, it looked like alias was about to follow suit. For years, Maya and before that, Power Animator lead the way in 3d graphics, and they are still an industry leader.
:) It would be a shame to see Alias and their products go away should SGI go the way of the dodo ( which is a very probrable thing to happen ).
I think the best thing that could happen is to seperate themselves away from SGI as much as possible. This has been happenning to some degree already. If you recall a few years back, the URL used to be www.aw.sgi.com , now its www.alias.com... odd that
As to the unnamed suitor, thats a bit hard to guess. Number 1... its most likely not Microsoft... they tried this game once. When NT 4 was new, they were the proud owners of SoftImage... it didnt work too well for them then... cant see them trying again. I cant picture it being Avid or Discreet, as they both already have a vested interest in a direct competitor ( SoftImage and 3d Studios Max respectively ). I cant see it being any linux company as suggested before... it just is to far from the core business of any of them, to make any sense. Their isnt a linux company I can think of, with the money to buy Alias, that has a focus on multimedia.
In my mind, if its a big name company, that leaves just one company that it makes sense to be. Apple. Maya was recently ported to both Mac and Linux... apple is losing its luster as a media empire... and they have the money. I say if its a big name company behind the buyout, it makes the most sense to be Apple. I just pray they keep the wintel ports going, or I will be very pissed off.
For those of you that dont know, Maya is one sweet piece of software, and a shining example of how to pioneer a user interface.
Although this "potential" sale wouldn't be as criminal as stealing a public company from the shareholders through inside dealings and voting fraud, the end results could be the same for end users if this is indeed another attempt by an MS-affiliated investment firm to prevent an ISV from supporting Linux. I hope I'm totally wrong here and Microsoft's business practises are not an issue here, although their success with neutralizing Corel might have encouraged them to take on companies and products that dare to support competing platforms, in this current climate of total lack of monopoly controls by US Department of (John Ashcroft's) Justice. MS did strike a deal with Disney just recently though...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Richard Kerris, tech diplomat extraordinaire and benefactor to the stars, was the exec at Alias
that made the OS X port of Maya happen. He's now Apple's Senior Director of Pro Applications.
Gates, of course, already has done this once. Microsoft bought SoftImage, which in my (widely-shared) opinion was the leading 3D animation software package of the day, back in 1995. Unfortunately for SoftImage users, development froze for the next froze years as they worked on an NT port. Microsoft eventually sold SoftImage to Avid in 1998, I believe for less than they paid for it. This slowed development further, and SoftImage lagged behind other packages.
SoftImage still has its hardcore fans, their current system XSI is really nice for a lot of things. Maya, though, dominates the high-end animation and effects field at this point.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It may make sense for Final Cut Pro (a product where trying to gain Windows marketshare doesn't make much sense, since the competition is reasonably stiff). It would make little sense to do this with Maya. The number of Windows and Linux users is already very high, and the Windows and Linux versions are already in production. It'd make little sense to simply cut off this marketshare, and I doubt Apple would turn their backs on the profits available, even to drive sales of Macs.
As someone who uses xsi professionally I can vouch for the sheer speed of the "subdivision surfaces" in xsi. However, it should be clarified that the subdees in xsi are polygons that are rounded with the either the catmull-clark, or the doo-sabin algorithms. Maya has both poly rounding and "real" heirarchial subdees, which are kinda neat. Unfortunately for maya, they're unbelieveably slow when interacting. In xsi I can take a 30k triangle base mesh and increase the subdiv count by 2 steps, which generates roughly 450k highres. Moving points around is quite quick, whereas the same mesh loaded up in maya is quite slow to interact with.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
I would like to try the software but they still won't release a low end demo copy for Linux. They've had Windows versions for a long while.
What's up with that?
about $0.38 per share. Almost took out a loan. Friend talked me out of it. Rose to nearly $4.00 a short while later..
I would be inclined to buy some anyway today. Bishop has a keen eye on SGIs core market:
Technical computing
IRIX is very good for this, MIPS is holding it back though. Their efforts on Linux will pay off, in my opinion. Linux is reaching the point where it will be possible to build an IRIX like system. Heck, you can today --it is only going to get easier.
SGI is one of the few companies to make a deal with Microsoft while still around to tell about it. (Legal won't, but many SGI folks will, if you catch them in the right mood.)
If that deal hadn't been the death of their 320 / 540 series machines, we would have great Linux technical workstations right now. I am not saying you cannot get a nice Linux workstation, but the SGI plan combined their engineering with custom Linux tweaks that would have made for nice boxes.
320/540 machines could support up to about 800Mb texture memory in a UMA design. Heavy texture models perform best in this configuration, because of the low latency bandwidth it provides to the graphics sub-system.
The Linux drivers were shown at Siggraph '99, I think. Microsoft and SGI had a little tiff shortly after that. Farenheit project --it seemed at the time, win32 was poised to take over that market since it had already made quite a dent. Gates knew about all the UNIX code that had to be rewritten. Direct X got good, thanks to SGI, but not good enough to justify all that work porting to a closed, hard to administer, expensive to cluster system with little ability to script or perform multi-user.
SGI legal scuttled the Linux drivers over win32 contract terms involving the ARC boot loader. It seems Microsoft has an interest in this that prevented SGI from providing machines with choices other than win32, or something like that. (Could never get the entire story.)
The series was canned. Generic PC machines running tweaked nVidia hardware replaced them to keep existing customers trying to leverage Linux happy. Their hardware had considerable advantages over the general purpose PC, so it only made sense for SGI to move away from the whole thing.
Today we see the Altix series machines along with high end SGI hardware on the desktop. The Altix, and high-end IRIX hardware is well positioned, while IRIX struggles at the workstation level. Linux is capturing applications far better than IRIX ever did.
(Which shows just how hard they got fucked over the Microsoft deal.)
Recovering from that and other blunders has taken a while. The new products are hitting their targets nicely. It is tough for them now, being late in the game. An SGI Linux workstation likely will not happen right away because of this. (We would have had them in '01, otherwise.)
SGI systems engineering is top notch, I hope they continue to improve and continue to develop their high bandwidth, single image designs. (They are the best, if you want a single OS image instead of a cluster.)
As for Alias, the organization beats to a different drum. The Maya side of things has been handled well. Can't say the same for their Studio product. Still high priced and no Linux --yet.
Maya is a hit in the entertainment business for obvious reasons. Their other product, Studio struggles in a niche status. Good for high end product design and styling, but poor at more mainstream applications. Traditional MCAD packages continue to consume many new potential Studio sales, while also chipping away at the established base of users.
I would not count the Linux version of Maya out. Alias knows better than that. There is no way the Studios are going to be pried back to win32. Going down that road proved expensive and problematic. Linux is the perfect fit. Alias would not be where they are today without having done that port.
OSS lets them (the studios) keep control of their tools an
Blogging because I can...
While Apple is a good bet, I'm thinking Adobe. Adobe has had a MAJOR gap when it comes to 3D, and they have been trying to fill it for ages. Last SIGGRAPH Adobe and Alias were hand in hand. I had quite a few AE friends from Alias that were in the Adobe booth performing demos.
As far as Alias goes, I used to sell Maya and Studio for 3 years. I have / had (layoffs) many friends that worked with and for Alias.
I'm really unsure how to classify this announcement. Doug Walker and James Christopher are probably (In my opinion) some of the worst people out there. It was a real shame to see these two take the helm as president and senior VP of customer support. I saw the attitude of the people go from "happy to come in" to "OMG I hate my job" once they moved in. After many Reseller and other private Alias events, I decided that these guys only cared about one thing, the bottom line. I knew this meant that the company was becoming just like the rest. Shortly before the price drop that I knew was coming, I left.
Also, keep in mind that when Maya 1.0 (with all the plug-ins, before unlimited) came out, it was around $100,000. The sales price of Maya dropped 93% over the past 5 years. Now that's AMAZING!
In summary, I think SGI is selling Alias because they know that it isn't going to keep making them money due to the drop in price. Also, I think that it's pretty clear that SGI either needs to get back to their core business or they are going to lose what little they have left.
Or... I'll go out on a limb here and say that ATI is going to purchase them.
Either way, this is going to be interesting.
At the time, Microsoft owned Softimage. Microsoft, having achieved their goal of moving 3D graphics onto Windows, sold off Softimage to Avid. Avid was the leader in 2D editing, but was starting to feel price pressure from below and was threatened by Softimage's move into that area. So they really bought Softimage to get the Softimage 2D editing package, and didn't really know what to do with the 3D product. Avid also had the problem that they were a high-end hardware vendor in a market where the high end was about to be eaten by the low end. As a result, the new Softimage 3D product, XSI, was years late.
So Maya took over. But it didn't help SGI sell expensive hardware. The low-end graphics boards were gaining on SGI. Maya was a software-only product, and didn't require SGI hardware. Maya is still available for Irix, but nobody buys SGI workstations to run it anymore. In fact, nobody buys SGI workstations for much of anything any more.
So it makes sense for SGI to sell off Maya. Of course, SGI doesn't have much of a core business left ("We're a graphics company! No, we're a workstation company! No, we're a server company! No, we're a Linux company!"). Their core business is selling expensive hardware, and that's not a good business to be in.
While it seems ridiculous in light of the more recent pricing, the big price drop for Maya was around 1999, when it dropped from $10,000 a module to $2000. It has/had five modules for a total of $50,000 for one seat of the full Maya software. Support contracts were around $4000 a year. When it dropped to a grand total of $10K for the whole deal, we thought the world had come to an end. I know people who paid the $50,000. Now it's $7000. Oi.
I do find it funny that everyone starts assuming that Apple is behind the sale of Alias. If you look at the past, Apple has typically only bought applications when there was no other chance of a port. Maya's been running on OSX for a while now (not with full parity to the Windows version, but hey).
Also, there is a very limited business case for buying Alias. When they dropped the price of Maya to $2K, they sold it to everyone who hadn't bought it at the previous price points. The market is COMPLETELY saturated. Just about every VFX shop has numerous Maya seats at this point. Game studios kept it afloat a while longer, but Softimage XSI is finally starting to edge it out in that market. Alias was even dumping licenses for free to compete with Softimage. With revenue just about tapped out, R&D is slowing ( a la Maya 5). The only viable financial future I see would be for Alias to refocus on Studio, which is still very popular in industrial design. There just ain't any money in making "high end" 3D (or 2D) tools anymore. Ford almost bought Alias a few years ago for ~$175M, if I remember correctly. I doubt it will go for nearly that much, now.
It'll be interesting to see what effect this has on Softimage. Avid is notorious for shafting their own products, so we'll see what they do to Soft.
An Alias rep made a post regarding the sale on the Highend3D Buzz Board, second post down.
It looks like some of the Alias folks are working a deal where the investment firm will purchase the assets from SGI and then the Alias person(s) will then purchase those assets from the investment firm. The Alias folks break free of SGI and SGI gets some badly-needed cash.
I've since confirmed this via a party who Knows Things. So no black helicopters from Cuptertino or Redmond, you conspiracy theorists :)
Either way, they still have to figure out how to pay for R&D (or not) with a fully saturated market. We'll see.
Comments have been posted over Adobe or Apple or ATI (wow think it'll have to be an A* company?) but after the San Diego SIGGraph last year, I'm wondering about nVidia as a purchaser. I saw Alias playing the buddy with several companies, but I have a feeling the nVidia is wanting to get a foothold on some of the more popular products that use their software. As far as Apple, I could maybe see it as with the port to Apple, Alias did not port the Unlimited version, but only the lower trim level Complete verstion. Either way, if nothing happens within a month, I'll be asking questions as I have the good fortune of going to Canada for over 3 weeks of training at their facility.