HPCwire: SGI CEO Sets Course Around HP, IBM

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September 14, 2011

SGI CEO Sets Course Around HP, IBM

“HP is confused,” said CEO of SGI, Mark Barrenchea during a recent visit to India—and in his opinion, this confusion within HP and other companies, including IBM, is creating a wealth of opportunities for SGI.

As a recent article in the Times of India noted, “HP’s uncertainty is turning out to be good for Barrenechea’s U.S. based supercomputing company, which recently posted better than expected results, even in an uncertain economic environment.”

The SGI CEO claims that “ninety days back Leo Apotheker announced three strategies for the company and 90 days later, he killed two of them.” Among the strategies he refers are HP’s confessed interested in mobility, cloud computing and connectivity. Not long after those announcements, the company pulled back on one of its consumer tablet devices, which were central to the company’s mobile and connectivity plans.

SGI’s strength is, of course, its role in the high performance computing market—a potentially lucrative playing field for IBM and HP alike. However, according to Barrenechea, both of those companies are suffering from sloppy strategies that are leaving SGI with a host of potential sources for new business.

According to the Times, “HP and IBM are almost 100 times larger than SGI, which expects to grow 24% to $780 million in FY' 12. But Barrenechea says SGI competes with HP at least a couple of dozen times in a year.” They reported that Barrenechea, who supplies supercomputing servers to Nasa, says customers “don't want to stick on with a company, who may tomorrow exit high performance computing, leaving them in the lurch.”

"IBM just walked away from a customer at the University of Illinois, a $200-million dollar project. I don't know how you will build a trusted relationship with a customer when you are willing to stand up to an important system and say just kidding," said Barrenechea.

According to the SGI CEO, "Technical computing is seeing a resurgence in many ways with many core processing, faster connectivity speeds, different price points to run tough math problems ... we are getting the sense that it's starting to hit an inflection point and starting to accelerate now," he said. Supercomputing power has crossed 20 petaflops per second, he says.

Full story at Times of India

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Submitted by larkforsure on Sep 14, 2011 @ 6:28 AM EDT

Complaint with IBM China CSR on the Centennial
Tragedy of Labor Rights Repression in IBM China
http://larkforsure.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/xinhua-news-agency%e2%80%93top-brands-tragedy-of-labor-rights-repression-in-ibm-china/
Scandal stricken IBM detained mother of ex-employee on the day of centennial
http://larkforsure.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/tencent-tech%EF%BC%9Ascandal-stricken-ibm-detained-mother-of-ex-employee-on-the-day-of-centennial/

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