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SGI Sells Alias Subsidiary to Accel-KKR
dmehus writes "SGI on Thursday announced it has agreed to sell its Alias subsidiary for $57.5 million in cash to Accel-KKR. Interestingly enough, Accel-KKR owns GroceryWorks, which powers and provides the online version of Safeway. After transaction costs and other items, SGI said it expects net proceeds from the sale come in line at $50 million. Slashdot covered this story in February, saying that SGI was rumoured to be in talks with an unnamed private equity firm, but now it is confirmed."
"SGI on Thursday announced it has agreed to sell its Alias subsidiary for $57.5 in cash to Accel-KKR."
I'll pay $58!!
Blah, blah blah.
Accel-KKR also owns globalCoal and Savista just another shark trying to get a corner on the market so they can control it. I am interested where globalCoal fits into the big picture though...
Look, see, understand
I would like to see Maya at Sourceforge. THAT would be a news for nerds and stuff that matters.
There you are, staring at me again.
...but damn, I do love seeing that old-school Silicon Graphics logo /. uses for the increasingly rare SGI post. Whatever mojo SGI had left was certainly gone after they went with that Comic Sans-looking text logo...
SGI doesn't have any other consumer products, and what the Maya product needs now is marketing. There's really not too many other things they can do to develop the product left... it's a matter of sales more than development.
A company in the position of SGI needs press releases to keep saying "I'm still here". A large percentage of the press releases were about Maya and Alias.
Is this a futile attempt at selling off the family silver in an effort to keep their failing business solvent or is it some shrewd move to raise cash for more profitable enterprises?
Is SGI a lost cause or is there life in it yet?
The Oakland tribute reports that a Billionaire increases Safeway stake. Accel-KKR owns GroceryWorks which is Safeway, Inc. exclusive online shopping provider.
Not only that, but KKR (not Accel-KKR) used to own Safeway. This was a few years back. They purchased it cheap, held on to it for a while, and made an absolute killing when they sold it. KKR are no fools (RJR notwithstanding).
I mean, I could see a FX company buying it...but an investment firm that handles grocery technology and coal services?
I'm sorry, but it brings to mind that back in the 70's when AMF bought Harley-Davidson...and look at THAT fiasco.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I had almost expected Apple to buy the rights to Alias. The Mac OS X version rocks, and they've got billions in the bank, $50m would have been pocket change. It could have complemented Shake and Logic, bring 3D into their professional tools. And then we could have looked forward to iModel, or whatever, as the low end consumer version.
Ah well, wasn't to be.
SGI paid $500 million to buy them in the first place. Boy, how times have changed.
NEW YORK, Feb. 7 / -- Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI), Alias Research, Inc.
(Nasdaq-NNM:ADDDF), and Wavefront Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: WAVE) today
announced that they have entered into definitivemerger agreements. The
combined organizations bolster Silicon Graphics' commitment to the
entertainment andcreative design markets, and allow the company to architect
the foundation necessary for software partners andcustomers to build the
digital studio of the 21st Century.
As a result of the mergers, Silicon Graphics will form a wholly owned,
independent software subsidiary that will focus on developing the world's most
advanced tools for the creation of digital content. Rob Burgess,
currentlypresident and CEO of Alias, will become president of the new company,
and Mike Noling, currently president andCEO of Wavefront, will report to
Burgess as vice president of operations. Martin Plaehn, currently
Wavefront'sexecutive vice president of corporate and product development, will
also report to Burgess to lead the technical team.
Under terms of the agreements, which were approved by the boards of directors
of the respective companies, Alias stockholders will receive the equivalent of
0.90 shares of Silicon Graphics' common stock for each share of Aliascommon
stock owned. Wavefront stockholders will receive 0.49 shares of Silicon
Graphics' common stock for eachshare of Wavefront common stock owned. The
closing prices for Silicon Graphics, Alias and Wavefront commonstock on Fr
iday, February 3, 1995, the last trading day prior to the board meetings to
approve the transaction, were$31.25, $20.875 and $12.625, respectively. The
shares to be issued by Silicon Graphics have a current market valueof
approximately $500 million.
I recall Cray be purchased for hundreds of millions then sold [ to Tera ] for tens of millions.
If it is the same KKR as in this article in "Der Spiegel" this might not bode well.
It seems all KKR is known for is in gutting companies and selling the rest for a profit.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Can a fully-3D online Safeway store with advanced texture mapping, particle physics and inverse-kinematics be far off?
"I forgot my mantra."
Also about this time SGI's ground breaking new system was the O2. It was really good at some niche video functions, including video textures. Unfortunately it had truly dismal memory bandwidth to the CPU, I guess they just forgot that this is one of the most basic building blocks of a computer with good performance. It was trailing just about everything on SPEC benchmarks before it even released(and it was late).
They sold a bunch of them to people who wanted cheap SGI's, like ILM. I speculate to this day that the O2 was a key contributor to ILM making so many bad movies during the era they relied on those steaming piles. They were just crushingly slow and I imagine any sucked the creativity out of any artist that had to use one, especially after they saw Maya running on a $2,000 PC or a Mac.
SGI does some really interesting niche technology but they have never had a CPU strategy that worked in any sustained way and they completely lost it in graphics when they kept trying to build multiboard graphics monstrosities while GLINT came out with the first graphics chip, followed by 3DFX, Nvidia and ATI. Carver Mead outlined a long time ago how to design electronics and that was to put everything on a CMOS chip. SGI didn't learn that lesson for some reason so all their graphics systems were big, bulky, somewhat unreliable and most importantly way to expensive to manufacture versus a mass produced GPU.
@de_machina
We didn't release a Maya PLE version for IRIX because of the low demand - the cost to make an IRIX version of PLE was too costly. However, we still ship commercial versions on IRIX.