SGI layoffs affect 33 at Chippewa Falls plant
Les Chappell • Published 03/06/06
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Chippewa Falls, Wis. - Silicon Graphics Inc., a manufacturer of high-performance computers headquartered in California, announced Friday the cutting of 33 jobs at their Chippewa Falls manufacturing plant as part of the company's restructuring.
These cuts, made in all areas of the business, bring the total employment of SGI's Chippewa Falls plant to 340.
According to Caroline Japic, director of corporate communications for SGI, the cuts were made throughout the company as part of CEO Dennis McKenna's restructuring plan following his appointment on January 31. Twelve percent of the company's workforce, or approximately 250 jobs, were eliminated as a result.
"It was across the board," Japic said. "It's the new CEO looking at our business model and where we are going, matching skills where people are—and where they weren't, we had to let people go."
Japic said that the cuts will be beneficial to the company in terms of focusing the core areas of their business, though they regret the loss of any talented employees.
In addition to these cuts, SGI also announced in a press release the resignations of CFO Jeff Zellmer and COO Warren Pratt, who are leaving SGI to pursue personal interests. SGI's corporate controller Kathy Lanterman will replace Zellmer as CFO, with no word on a replacement for Pratt.
Although Japic couldn't comment on the possibility of future layoffs at the Chippewa Falls plant, she emphasized that for now it is still business as usual.
"We have been manufacturing in Chippewa Falls for more than 10 years and are committed to the community," Japic said. "[These layoffs] will help the current employees and the new employees."
SGI's next move, according to the release, will be to consolidate its compute server and visualization platform and pursue new markets in the enterprise space. They will also expand their line of Altix servers with systems based on the new line of dual-core Intel Itanium 2 "Montecito" processors, and oversee the installations of the 4,096-processor supercomputer at Germany's Leibniz Computing Center and the high-performance computing environment at Dresden University of Technology.
More stories about SGI's past Wisconsin projects:
• SGI's Wisconsin branch builds fastest supercomputer yet in four months
• UW-Madison picks scalable SGI computer to simulate weather
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