HPE Acquires SGI For $275 Million (venturebeat.com) 100
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.
I wonder what (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
I meant, I would not be surprised if they were in the red
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
revenue != profits. Net income ~ -39 million. Probably bought for their technology portfolio.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
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: (Score:2)
"At least Kubrick fans will always remember IBM"
I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I won't
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
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: (Score:2)
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: (Score:1)
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 (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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... [cnet.com]
Re: (Score:1)
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 sing
Re: (Score:2)
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 work
Re: (Score:2)
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 po
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't seen SGI products in years.
Well, their IRIX workstations were just pure awesomesity!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Have a look - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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?... [youtube.com]
The Graveyard of tech (Score:2)
RIP SGI.
Re:The Graveyard of tech (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:1)
Re: The Graveyard of tech (Score:2, Insightful)
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 clu
Re: The Graveyard of tech (Score:2, Informative)
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 enormou
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re:The Graveyard of tech (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Is Fiscal 2016 over with already? (Score:1)
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: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
HP's fiscal year ends the last day of October.
How is SGI relevant to HPE? (Score:2)
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 workstat
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
..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: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
HPE makes Enterprise hardware as well as networking hardware and IT services.
Re: (Score:2)
They are dumping off their services division.
Re: (Score:2)
HPE is dumping EDS
Re: (Score:2)
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:Fuck... (Score:5, Funny)
> 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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ha! We could only hope.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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? (Score:2)
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: (Score:3)
SGI is still around? (Score:2)
Well, I'll be damn, I thought they died years ago. What have they been up to all these years?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Rackable (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Kind of Funny (Score:2)
HPE Buying more hardware (Score:2)
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: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
An interesting idea. Though Intel would have to agree to it.
Re: (Score:2)
Nimbler companies won't reverse customer experienc (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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.
GooglePlex??? (Score:2)
I thought the old SGI building was now the Computer History Museum...
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
HP where tech companies of the 80's and 90's go... (Score:2)
... 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?
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)