>>Here are the numbers I am seeing:
Graphics is growing pretty rapidly. I don't have a hard number. But in the conf call SGI stated that O2 sales are growing faster than NT sales. Because O2 is in ramp up, this is understandable. It will be interesting to see if this is still the case a year from now.<<
I guess the question on O2 growth is what the denominator is -- as you note, if you start from 0, then your growth looks pretty good. Here are some numbers with respect to NT:
- Sales of NT and BackOffice: 1996: $591M, 1997: $1,800M
- Sales of HP NT PC's: $1.1B in 1997, 10X growth from 1996.
(Source: Fortune, Montgomery Securities)
- Unit Sales of NT: 1994: 335K, 1995: 1048K, 1996: 2,932K
(Source: Fortune, IDC)
>>UNIX workstation market is growing at 45%/year and Internet at 100%+/year. <<
I honestly didn't understand that the Unix workstation market was growing at 45% a year. What's the source on this? Is this unit growth or sales growth?
I'm absolutely guilty of looking at the tremendous growth of NT and comparing against what I had thought was only 10%-20% growth in Unix and calling it "shrinking" -- I shouldn't have done that.
I recently read a Scott McNealy interview in which he claimed to outship, in terms of units and revenue, all other workstation vendors combined. Do you buy this? Let's accept the fact that NT growth seems fairly amazing and just focus on Unix -- is SGI gaining or losing ground to Sun, HP, and others in terms of unit or revenue growth? I honestly don't know -- but would love to hear from anyone who does.
>>I am very happy that SGI has recognized and is addressing the latter sector which involves a lot of database applications. It's pretty by now that they have a good advantage over their competitors at least in terms of the hardware.<<
Is it? I certainly agree that in terms of high performance graphics, SGI has a lead over all of the major players and over most of the smaller ones as well. Do you believe that this holds true across the board? I haven't recently seen SGI in any TPC-C or TPC-D outstanding results -- have they recently submitted some superior numbers?
>>This is going to be one of the largest expansion areas in the next 10 years. Unlike graphics, high-end database apps affect everybody that uses the web.<<
If you have a chance, I'd love to hear you expound on your theory that SGI will do well in this market -- I haven't yet been able to theorize a competitive advantage for the company in this segment.
Thanks! |
