HPE Acquires SGI For $275 Million (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced today that it has acquired SGI for $275 million in cash and debt. VentureBeat provides some backstory on the company that makes servers, storage, and software for high-end computing: "SGI (originally known as Silicon Graphics) was cofounded in 1981 by Jim Clark, who later cofounded Netscape with Marc Andreessen. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 after being de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange. In 2009 it was acquired by Rackable Systems, which later adopted the SGI branding. SGI's former campus in Mountain View, California, is now the site of the Googleplex. SGI, which is now based in Milpitas, California, brought in $533 million in revenue in its 2016 fiscal year and has 1,100 employees, according to the statement. HPE thinks buying SGI will be neutral in terms of its financial impact in the year after the deal is closed, which should happen in the first quarter of HPE's 2017 fiscal year, and later a catalyst for growth." HP split into two separate companies last year, betting that the smaller parts will be nimbler and more able to reverse four years of declining sales.

Comments

I wonder what

[saloomy]

IP or market segments they are looking to expand to. I haven't seen SGI products in years.

Re:I wonder what

[rijrunner]

I saw they have $500 in revenue last year, but I would be very surprised if they were in the red. I suspect this was to try to position for the USPS contract renewal and for customer transfer. HP did something similar with Apollo back in the day. (Compaq and a slew of other businesses were still going concerns. Apollo was on its downward spiral when HP acquired them.)

Re:I wonder what

[rijrunner]

I meant, I would not be surprised if they were in the red

Re:I wonder what

[epiphani]

The traditional products SGI was known for are gone... this new company, Rackable, which lifted the SGI brand in 2009, does some pretty interesting integrated rack products, both on density and power consumption.

What I don't understand is how HPE bought a company that did over $500M in revenue for $275M. This doesn't make sense.

Re:I wonder what

[plopez]

revenue != profits. Net income ~ -39 million. Probably bought for their technology portfolio.

Re:I wonder what

[hambone142]

HP hasn't had a successful acquisition since they bought Convex Computer decades ago. They essentially trash every company they buy and either let it die or sell off the remains. Palm, EDS, Zenith Data Systems.... it goes on.

Since HP is now run by bean counters, acquisitions give an "illusion of progress" to those who cannot lead innovation.

This has been a systemic problem with HP since the Fiorina days.

The company is dying and most of their innovators have moved on in frustration.

Re: I wonder what

[Anonymous Coward]

HP is no longer a relevant company, in either form. The are basically IBM without the long history. Both will be gone in a decade and it's a race to see who will lapse into obscurity first. My money is on HP. At least Kubrick fans will always remember IBM.

Re:I wonder what

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't understand is how HPE bought a company that did over $500M in revenue for $275M. This doesn't make sense.

High revenue but very high costs of goods sold and very lengthy sales cycle. RFP, spec, tender, acceptance, build, install, commission, acceptance. It can (and does) take years.

Re:I wonder what

[guruevi]

Looking over their site, it doesn't look all that interesting. It's just a standard reference Intel configuration. I can get the same from SuperMicro and a host of other sites probably for a lot cheaper.

Re:I wonder what

[Bing Tsher E]

When SGI went down the shitter, and dropped the MIPS architecture, they immediately started making Wintel boxes that ran Windows NT. The feeling seems to have been that they were somewhat better than average Wintel boxes.

I can't figure out why anybody would ever have bought one of them, but they eventually turned up on the University Surplus equipment auctions. Nobody was much interested at all in them at that point.

Re: I wonder what

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... Intel, yes, Windows, no.

SGI bought Cray, kept the engineers, and sold off the branding. They then made supercomputers â" first with Itanium, later with Xeon.

Their UV system is probably the last huzzah for la he shared memory systems, made by nearly retired engineers who hated clusters passionately. (Cray himself referred to clusters as a team of chickens)

While you could boot Windows on a UV system, it was limited to 256 cores. Linux didn't have that limitation. Terabytes of RAM, millions of cores.

They sold a lot of RHEL and SUSE Linux.

Re: I wonder what

[EvilAlphonso]

Circa 2000, the SGI workstations were indeed Wintel boxes with NVidia cards... at an SGI price.

Re:I wonder what

[KiloByte]

I haven't seen SGI products in years.

Well, their IRIX workstations were just pure awesomesity!

Re: I wonder what

[Anonymous Coward]

The only unix workstation that had major PC productivity software titles ported to it, by the way.

Re:I wonder what

[Anonymous Coward]

At that time, the choice was 32-bit UNIX workstations at UNIX prices (An Indy workstation cost £10K+ for a basic system just for software OpenGL). PC's were rapidly catching up with new boards coming out every three months; multi-texturing, hardware lighting, programmable vertex programs, programmable fragment programs. Even a 450Hz Dell PC could run SGI red book tutorials with lighting and hardware texture mapping. Film industry startup companies were getting fed up with this price difference. A single desktop PC might not be as powerful as a workstation, but a cluster of them are more reliable as a render farm and can be repaired/upgraded inhouse.

Then Microsoft was marching around, banging on a large drum and shouting that "UNIX was Legacy! Windows NT is the future!" non-stop day and night. That freaked out more shareholders. One problem for commercial CAD/visualisation application/animation developers was that they couldn't support every single combination of OS and hardware (Alias, Wavefront, Softimage, Photoshop were the leading applications of the time). So they could support at most five workstation vendors. When Windows NT comes out, that knocked one workstation vendor out of each market segment. SGI was convinced that Hollywood would continue buying SGI workstations because they had the SGI logo on the monitor, and artists/animators would only want to use anything with the SGI logo on the front. Meanwhile everyone was getting used to working with PC's, even if they still had CRT monitors at this time.

By then it was too late. Engineers left for Nvidia and 3Dfx.

Re: I wonder what

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly, except the UV line. The UV systems are single image systems with up to 64TB ram and hundreds of sockets. They are used for large in-memory applications or databases. There really isn't a comparable alternative. But they are very niche and not the most reliable systems. Also, SGI is beholden to Intel for any future scalability beyond 64TB due to the number of physical memory addressing bits currently implemented in the Xeon processors.

Re: I wonder what

[unixisc]

Precisely. The only time SGI took a stab at NT - actually, it was their subsidiary MIPS that did - was at the beginning of Windows NT, when they made a workstation called the Magnum based on an R4000 CPU and an EISA bus (mirroring DEC's first foray into the NT market w/ an Alpha 150MHz on the same configuration). That was somewhere in 1994-95, before Windows 95 was even out

Re:I wonder what

[unixisc]

I sometimes think that companies like Silicon Graphics and DEC could have served themselves better by making a serious push to get their entire suite of applications on NT for their RISCstations. Like offering a wide range of price points for AlphaSstations to developers to have a variety of CAD applications on NT/Alpha: they could have held their own against Intel for a bit. Similarly, Sun, which was heavily anti Microsoft, and HP, could have standardized on NeXTstep, which was just ported to their workstations. IBM could have done OS/2 for PowerPC and made that an option for companies that were trying to enter the Mac clone market, like Power Computing, Umax and Motorola PSD. There wouldn't have been a monopoly, but neither would there have been 10 different types of UNIX w/ widely varying specs where each port was a unique project.

However, what really killed the UNIX workstation market was once Microsoft unified the code base under NT, thereby making it possible for PCs to have multiple CPUs. Intel then introduced the cores, and since they were several generations ahead of DEC, Sun, IBM, et al, they had no problems tossing 2, 4, 8 cores on a CPU and catching up on the competitiveness - the only drawback the Pentium had vis a vis RISC. In the meantime, Linux had also caught on, so if somebody wanted to run Windows applications AND avoid the traditional drawbacks of Windows 98, there was Wintel NT, and if one wanted inexpensive Unixstations running around a standard UNIX like OS, there was Lintel. Once that was the picture, the case for SPARCstations, Irixstations, or POWERstations shrank rapidly. I do miss those, and wish we could have something like those today, but running things like NeXTstep or GNUSTEP, Windows 7 on RISC or OS/2 or Linux or PC-BSD

Re: I wonder what

[unixisc]

I recall Mathematica being there on it. What else did it have?

Re:I wonder what

[secret_squirrel_99]

HP hasn't had a successful acquisition since they bought Convex Computer decades ago. They essentially trash every company they buy and either let it die or sell off the remains. Palm, EDS, Zenith Data Systems.... it goes on.

Since HP is now run by bean counters, acquisitions give an "illusion of progress" to those who cannot lead innovation.

This has been a systemic problem with HP since the Fiorina days.

The company is dying and most of their innovators have moved on in frustration.

That isn't quite true. While some have certainly been busts, others 3PAR and Aruba for example have been quite successful.

Re:I wonder what

[Anonymous Coward]

It included buying out their debt as well.

Re:I wonder what

[cthulhu11]

You found that acquisition successful? At 83 cents a share?

Re: I wonder what

[haruchai]

"At least Kubrick fans will always remember IBM"

  I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I won't

Re: I wonder what

[haruchai]

Precisely. The only time SGI took a stab at NT - actually, it was their subsidiary MIPS that did - was at the beginning of Windows NT, when they made a workstation called the Magnum based on an R4000 CPU and an EISA bus (mirroring DEC's first foray into the NT market w/ an Alpha 150MHz on the same configuration). That was somewhere in 1994-95, before Windows 95 was even out

Not the only. The SGI Visual Workstations didn't show up until 2002, initially running NT4 and moving to Win2K some time later and this was SGI, not MIPS.

http://www.cnet.com/news/nt-wo...

Re: I wonder what

[haruchai]

Have a look - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

AutoCAD, Framemaker, Illustrator, MATLAB, Wordperfect, Alias, Maya, Renderman, Kai's Power Tools. Lightwave 3D

Here's an O2 with a few of those installed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The Graveyard of tech

[rijrunner]

RIP SGI.

Re:The Graveyard of tech

[TheGratefulNet]

I worked for SGI in mtn view a few years before their demise.

one of the funnest places I was ever at. such a shame to see them go. even worse to think that google (puke!) took their campus over and its now run by ad-men, so to speak.

not to mention that traffic around shoreline area is a nightmare, all the way up rt 101 for several miles. thanks again, google ;(

sgi had class and created some stellar products. sadly, they went down a dark side with the WBT project (internally called 'wintel box thing' their x86 systems running modified NT and no BIOS).

but wow, working at sgi was so much fun. silicon valley used to be cool. now, its a fucking sweat shop for h1b's and 'social media' companies (double puke).

Re:The Graveyard of tech

[afgun]

No no, Stellar was a different company. ;-)

Re:The Graveyard of tech

[Anonymous Coward]

There was nothing they could have done to stop the flood of cheap x86 machines taking away their bread and butter market. It was clear if you went to SIGGRAPH in the timeframe of '96-'97 that their whole market became commoditized practically overnight. I don't know what they could have done to mitigate that.

Re:The Graveyard of tech

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess you were one of the guys who made the Jurassic Park's control system, right? ;-)

Re: The Graveyard of tech

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I was at SIGGRAPH in 1997 and it was like a playground for SGI enthusiasts. By 1998, we were all running Renderman on whatever clusters we could throw together. It was becoming clear that the future of graphics rendering was going to be in large clusters working together. SGI was built around the concept of single machines being big workhorses. When you have a cluster, you start caring less about the individual machines and instead focus on frames per second that you can render and the cost of the cluster.

SGI just couldn't win that battle because the machines were simply too expensive.

Linux was storming the (server) world and basically, as you say, both SGI and (real) UNIX, overnight, found that their milkshakes had been drunk -- so to speak.

Re:The Graveyard of tech

[jandrese]

I was working for SGI as a co-op when that Pentium 4 thing came out. We got a demo unit and I was pretty disappointed. The flatscreen monitor they shipped with it was way more exciting even if it experienced epic tearing when we played the demo video. It's the only PC I ever used that has RAMBUS memory.

We did have one guy come down and give a demo of Maya (or maybe it was Alias Wavefront at that point? I can't remember) and being amazed at how the demo guy could build and animate an entire scene in about an hour, even though the interface appeared to be 100% black magic. IIRC he had a spaceship he had built from a box flying around a city he built fighting a dinosaur he pulled out of some asset library.

Re: The Graveyard of tech

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't disagree. They spent millions to develop their Altix and UV lines (big shared memory systems, thousands of cores).

While they sold clusters, it was half hearted at best. They eventually stopped updating the cluster hardware to "focus" on their behemoths. A lot of the Crayons (ex cray engineers) at SGI hated clusters with the passion of a thousand suns.

They were also amazingly overbuilt systems - custom designed fans instead of commodity fans. Their chassis were built like tanks - they used an enormous amount of steel, and weighed 4-5x more than anything else on the market.

A lot of the engineers were so blinded by their hatred of clusters that they forgot that price matters to a customer. If you're doing the same job, and one vendor costs 5-6x more for the EXACT SAME OUTPUT, you've got to expect that one vendor to lose most bids.

Re: The Graveyard of tech

[Anonymous Coward]

All the workstation vendors custom built their systems from scratch; chassis, circuit boards, ASIC's, GPU's, disk controllers, memory chips, even OS. Everything was designed to match a specific performance levels for a particular release date (CPU flops, data storage IO), cost no limit. Hundreds of engineers would be employed to design one workstation. A new workstation would be released every couple of years.

Along come home-built PC's, with standard chassic, custom cases, off-the-shelf components with plug-and-play drivers. Users just slot in and out components until they get something that works. Or a local PC shop will do that for them. Slap in a 100-base-T network card in each PC and you have a cluster. Buy a handful and you get a discount enough to cover spare parts. No need for true Ethernet co-axial cable (big yellow and blue cables with vampire taps), twisted-pair does just as well. Upgrade is continual, whenever a new CPU or GPU comes out. Maybe a new motherboard comes out and you'll have to upgrade everything.

Re: The Graveyard of tech

[silentcoder]

I remember sometime circa 2003 a headline on /. that Linux had replaced more NT systems than commercial unix systems that year - this was big news because until then, Linux was mostly growing by killing of every unix systems company. The real SCO sold their unix business to Caldera (a Linux company) who would later go on to sue IBM over Unix, Sun died a most inglorious death despite trying very hard to reinvent itself in the naughties, SGI and IRIX went the way of the dodo, even HPUX got relegated to little more than maintaining legacy systems.
AIX seemed to survive but mostly as a massive virtualization platform for running Linux VMs on - a market that amazon has now effectively destroyed.

Is Fiscal 2016 over with already?

[SethJohnson]

Per the statement released by HP about SGI--

The company has approximately 1,100 employees worldwide, and had revenues of $533 million in fiscal 2016.

Have they already closed the books on 2016 earnings? Heck yeah they need to get bought. The hardware running their accounting software is literally more than a month faster than anything I've seen in the industry.

Re:Is Fiscal 2016 over with already?

[quintus_horatius]

Have they already closed the books on 2016 earnings? Heck yeah they need to get bought. The hardware running their accounting software is literally more than a month faster than anything I've seen in the industry.

They may have a tax year that starts as early as June 1, so yeah they might be in 2017, fiscally speaking.

Re: Is Fiscal 2016 over with already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Confused. Over a thousand?
Is this HP or SGI?

Re:Is Fiscal 2016 over with already?

[hambone142]

HP's fiscal year ends the last day of October.

Re:Is Fiscal 2016 over with already?

[Anonymous Coward]

HP's fiscal year ends the last day of October.

Which has nothing to do with when SGI's fiscal year ends....

How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[unixisc]

Had HP, Inc bought SGI, I might have understood. That's the part of the company that still makes computers.

But HPE is the EDS part of the company - the one that's into outsourcing IT services. How is SGI relevant to that? Is HPE the part of the company that still owns their server business and so on? What does SGI bring to the table?

On a different note, who were the people still buying SGI to give them a half billion revenue? What exactly do they sell - it's not like one can buy Irix based workstations or servers anymore, or even Linux ones, from what I understand.

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is support contracts on old iron, which would make it a perfect fit for HPE's outsourced support.

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[dgatwood]

Maybe this is just another silo experiment on a broader scale—split HP in two and encourage them both to go after each other mercilessly....

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[bobthesungeek76036]

..On a different note, who were the people still buying SGI to give them a half billion revenue? What exactly do they sell - it's not like one can buy Irix based workstations or servers anymore, or even Linux ones, from what I understand.

Remember, SGI is not the SGI of old. Rackable bought SGI (Silicon Graphics) and the renamed the company SGI. So I imagine most of the product line was heritage Rackable?

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[GNU(slash)Nickname]

But HPE is the EDS part of the company - the one that's into outsourcing IT services. How is SGI relevant to that? Is HPE the part of the company that still owns their server business and so on? What does SGI bring to the table?

No, HPE is HP Enterprise. Networking, servers, storage, etc.

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[hambone142]

HPE makes Enterprise hardware as well as networking hardware and IT services.

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[plopez]

HPE is dumping EDS

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[nbritton]

Had HP, Inc bought SGI, I might have understood. That's the part of the company that still makes computers.

Sorry, no. HPE still makes servers and big iron. Consumer goods like desktops, laptops, tablets, and printers is what went to HP, Inc.

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[plopez]

They are dumping off their services division.

Re: How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sgi was selling big Linux Hpc clusters.

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[TheGratefulNet]

that's not correct. sgi renamed to sgi while it was still in mtn view. they changed their logo (lost that very cool cube icon) and their logo and name were shortened to sgi. after that they were never again silicon graphics.

Re: How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[Anonymous Coward]

SGI outsourced thier manufacturing around 3 years ago. Engineering had... Issues. There were a lot of nearly retired engineers sitting in thier foxhole, a pitchfork in hand shrieking "not me!" There was a lot of backstabbing to ensure the other guy got laid off.

I remember trying to write software for SGI: thier hardware guys plopped an i2c temperature sensor at various places on the board - pretty normal stuff.

They were furious when we couldn't read any data. After much argument, we discovered the chips were never wired up - no solder pads, no traces. The chip was literally glued to the board, with no electrical connection to the pins. We even popped the chip off to show there were no solder pads, and there was no solder.

Next they insisted a "competent" software team could easily work around a chip with no electrical connections, and that we were too young to work on thier systems.

I quite like graybeards that know what they are doing. But it's hard to respect a team who go full CYA Attack mode to cover up the fact they made a tiny mistake.

Re:How is SGI relevant to HPE?

[Anonymous Coward]

People (like NASA) still buy shared memory machines from SGI. There's not much competition in that market segment.

Fuck...

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with this world?!?!

Sillicon Graphics - $275 Million
WhatsApp - $22'000 Million

and HP, the destroyer of worlds, the anti-midas, who turns to crap whatever it touches, shoot me...

Re:Fuck...

[UnknownSoldier]

> HP, the destroyer of worlds,

Actually it is more like this old joke:

Q. How do you known when a tech company is no longer valuable?
A. When HP buys it.

*ba dum tsh*

Re:Fuck...

[unixisc]

They should next buy SCO, or Xinuos, as it's now called. Maybe CSC can do that

Re:Fuck...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, same thing as DEC. What, you've never heard of them? ;-)

Re:Fuck...

[UnknownSoldier]

Ha! We could only hope.

Re:Fuck...

[unixisc]

Actually, DEC had been bought by Compaq, which in turn was digested by HP

You can pry

[Anonymous Coward]

my Octane out of my cold, dead hands.

RIP SGI.

Re:You can pry

[Anonymous Coward]

My Octane is gathering dust and may well be dead as well as cold for all I know. In a past life it was used to design Formula 1 cars.

Re:You can pry

[Anonymous Coward]

See, that's the thing with these machines. All of them have some cool backstory. My Octane has an Enron assets tag, heh.

Re: You can pry

[Anonymous Coward]

Your shitty Octane will be cold and dead fairly soon, so why bother?

Re:You can pry

[armanox]

I still love my Octane. And I've got a second one sitting here as well, that I'll setup one of these days (and I've got a V6 GPU to add to it when I do!). IRIX is just so nice to work with compared to modern operating systems.

WTF?

[fnj]

What?? SGI still exists????? As anything more than a worthless shell? It's been a loooooong time since I heard anything from that graveyard.

Re:WTF?

[phantomfive]

That's what I was wondering too when I saw the headline. Looks like they managed to pivot to a company that provides high-performance computing to the same company-set that uses Oracle and SAP. (In other words, probably only certain departments at fortune 500 companies).

SGI is still around?

[BLToday]

Well, I'll be damn, I thought they died years ago. What have they been up to all these years?

Re:SGI is still around?

[jandrese]

Nothing related to graphics apparently.

Re:SGI is still around?

[guruevi]

The brand got bought, "SGI" is now selling basic, standard SuperMicro servers and putting the logo on it. They also apparently support your average Hadoop, SAP etc. implementation.

Re:SGI is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that Rackable bought SGI, and renamed themselves SGI. I was there for the transition and several years before and after.

Rackable bought all of the SGI assets, people, and facilities, and immediately dumped all of the old Rackable products, facilities, and people. The only thing from Rackable to remain is the name "rackable" for a line of commodity servers.

SGI Continued to develop & build SGI's signature hardware: UV and Ice systems, which are both completely custom, in-house architectures with everything completely custom from the motherboards to the case fans. UV3000 was introduced this year.

SGI has line of clusters (SGI Rackable) that are a commodity server. SGI stopped updating the hardware for the line ages ago -- the top-level Engineering Management consisted of ex-Cray engineers who "would rather die" (and that's a direct quote) than build another cluster.

(Cray is famous for calling a cluster "a team of chickens")

So SGI builds fully custom hardware. They could never recoup the development costs because the market wasn't willing to pay a premium for it -- especially when a commodity cluster produces the exact same output, using the exact same tools, in less time and for a fraction of the cost.

Rackable

[bobthesungeek76036]

For of those in need of an SGI history lesson, the SGI currently in business is not quite the same SGI (Silicon Graphics) of old. Remember that Rackable Systems acquired Silicon Graphics back in 2009 for like $20M I think? And they turned around and renamed Rackable to SGI.

Re:Rackable

[Anonymous Coward]

In the beginning, there was the Silicon Graphics of old. It died a flaming death in 2006.

The company's creditors then created the "new" SGI. All of the assets from Silicon Graphics were transferred to teh new company, and the old stock was cancelled -- holders of the old stock with worthless shares.

The "new" SGI sold its facilities in Silicon Valley to Google (and is now the GooglePlex)

The new SGI was never really profitable, burned through the GooglePlex money, and died a flaming death in 2009.

Rackable bought the bankrupt new SGI, and renamed the company from Rackable to "Silicon Graphics International".

The SGI people were kept, the SGI facilities and products were kept, and everything and everybody orignially from Rackable was dumped to the curb.

I was there for the transition. It was a very, very odd acquisition.

Silicon Graphics International then burned through all cash it had, went deeply in debt, and sold its manufacturing facilities to pay off its debts, and give it a positive balance sheet.

I left about then, noting the company's cash reserves would last it a few years, and nothing had changed since the first death of SGI.

The cash from the sale of its manufacturing has now been spent, and HPE bought up SGI's debt and assets.

I'm not sure who will kill the other first: SGI or HP.

Kind of Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Name brand for common toys, tools and food become pointless. Sugar is sugar. The name SGI and HP are past things. Get over it. I'd don't spend money on name brands when they don't offer anything new.

Re: Kind of Funny

[cunina]

Go buy some Chinese sugar, then.

There is a simple way to recreate the old SV...

[Anonymous Coward]

But it requires enough techies, greybeard, or pfy to congregate in the same place far far away from the perversion of the modern tech nightmare to begin building something new. And unlike the previous time they would need to stay away from VC and 'Angel Investors' and bootstrap it from the ground up. Selling out may have worked in the past, but look where it got us. If you aren't willing to either work the business until you or it dies, or at least hand it over to the rest of the workers when you want out, it'll just morph into the shit we had before.

Just 2 cents from a former techie who's watched too many good businesses get eaten by the bad.

HPE Buying more hardware

[plopez]

They are dumping off Enterprise Services, are buying SGI, and wanted to buy EMC. I predict that they will sell or spin off their software division soon and make a pure enterprise hardware play. Which makes sense as software is hard to manage and HPE understands hardware much better.

Re:HPE Buying more hardware

[unixisc]

Why not then buy Itanium from Intel, since the latter doesn't seem to sell it to anyone else? They can still have Intel manufacture it, or if the volumes don't justify it, have it made by TSMC or someone else on the other side of the rim

Re:HPE Buying more hardware

[plopez]

An interesting idea. Though Intel would have to agree to it.

Re:HPE Buying more hardware

[unixisc]

I would think Intel would be happy to. The only reason they haven't stopped making it is that HP won't allow them. If they sell it to HP, then it's no longer a losing business for them - it's an account that they can either keep or lose.

Nimbler companies won't reverse customer experienc

[Kobun]

Every piece of HP kit we've had has been a lemon. We have a 100% failure rate within 5 years on whole classes of desktop machines that we've bought from them, and the servers I have of theirs (that are still around) are a constant headache to get a management session going to their ILO. Unless they're going to give me a batch of equipment FOR FREE to let me use for a year and see that it no longer sucks, my budget will be spent somewhere else. Forever.

Fiorina: A new verb

[Anonymous Coward]

HP is doing what is done by companies which have amassed more wealth than they know what to do with, and in which the spark of innovation has long since died: They'll pay any amount (because money is "cheap" to them) for anything to anyone. Fiorina is long gone, but we should invent a verb for this practice in honor of her. http://fortune.com/2015/09/17/... http://www.businessinsider.com... http://fortune.com/2011/08/21/...

They keep doing it because it's a great tactic to prime the stock price: shareholders only see the short term gain, and by the time the company splutters the instigators are drifting to the ground in their golden parachutes.

Re:Fiorina: A new verb

[silentcoder]

Maybe I should have cheered Fiorina's presidential bid after all. I've always said that great generally* CEOs make terrible presidents (contrary to what republicans seem to believe) since the two jobs have almost diametrically opposed definitions of "success" - but does that mean horrible CEOs will make great presidents ?

*There are a few, rare, exceptions both in the US and globally - but generally these are people who are naturally gifted at learning very different careers and skillsets and approach the political job as a brand new career in which their past experience has very little value. The entire nature of the organisation you are now heading up is different, it's economics work according to completely different rules - and even the techniques by which you organise and motivate people are entirely different since the incentive structure is nothing alike (and neither can nor should be similar).

Re:Fiorina: A new verb

[unixisc]

She's now trying to become the head of the RNC. If Trump wins, I hope he includes Reince Priebus in his cabinet, but make someone like Corey Lewandowski the RNC chairman. That should show amateurs like Carly the door, so that she's forced to find a real private sector job and have something beyond HP that she can flaunt as a success.

GooglePlex???

[bobthesungeek76036]

... SGI's former campus in Mountain View, California, is now the site of the Googleplex ...

I thought the old SGI building was now the Computer History Museum...

Re:GooglePlex???

[Guy Harris]

... SGI's former campus in Mountain View, California, is now the site of the Googleplex ...

I thought the old SGI building was now the Computer History Museum...

SGI campus. One of the old SGI buildings now houses the Computer History Museum; the rest of the campus is now the Googleplex.

Re:GooglePlex???

[bobthesungeek76036]

I guess I'm just an old fart because back in my day there was no "campus". That building WAS Silicon Graphics...

Re:Nimbler companies won't reverse customer experi

[Anonymous Coward]

even if you got piles of hw for FREE, it will still cost you $$$ in the long run.

I've had that experience with Dell, for FREE.

now I buy SuperMicro made in America stuff. no problems.

HP where tech companies of the 80's and 90's go...

[williamyf]

... to die.

HP got Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computers (via Compaq), and now Silicon Graphics as well (yes, yes, we know, SGI went Kaput and was acquired by rackspace...).

Should have bought SUN as well...

What's next? Cray?

I wonder if they can

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they can f*ck this one up to?

Silicon Graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

My mother worked on those when I was a kid, so I recall playing with Buttonfly and the flight simulator a lot. Fond memories. Those machines were HEAVY, though. Even the PC-sized ones.

Don't you mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

had 1,100 employees

all the good ones will depart as soon as this deal closes. The rest will be laid off within 6 months.
That is the HPE way. 'Innovate' my ass.

Re:HP where tech companies of the 80's and 90's go

[silentcoder]

I think they technically already got CRAY since Cray was bought by SGI after Seymore died. A lot of the last generation of real SGI machines were designed by ex-Cray engineers.

Re:HP where tech companies of the 80's and 90's go

[iggymanz]

eh, the descendants of the products of those acquisitions are still around. Tandem is HP's Nonstop, Compaq the servers (which still have compaq on components inside and in many firmware/drivers). The tech from DEC was sold to various companies, the most notable being various processor system designs sold to Intel and which you're using right now

Re:HP where tech companies of the 80's and 90's go

[unixisc]

Sun had already been digested by Oracle. And with it, Cray. I think at some point, HP itself may get bought by Lenovo

Re:Nimbler companies won't reverse customer experi

[sconeu]

This is HPE -- HP Enterprise. It spun off from HP about a year ago.

HPE does the big iron. NonStop (aka Tandems), HPUX, and I'm guessing Windows servers as well. Enterprise class storage, networking, etc...

Not the HP desktop people.

Re:HP where tech companies of the 80's and 90's go

[Anonymous Coward]

> acquired by rackspace

rackable!

Memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

So many memories with SGI workstations. I was saddened when SGI folded in 2009, this is just like hammering the stake a little further in vampire that's been dead for almost a decade. Very, very sad.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion