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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.
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.