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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.
IP or market segments they are looking to expand to. I haven't seen SGI products in years.
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).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> 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*
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.
Karma: Bad
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.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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
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.
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.
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.