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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems
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To: paul who wrote (12201)12/1/1998 12:33:00 AM
From: Bala Vasireddi  Read Replies (1) of 64865
 
>my understanding is that Sun got the Cray technology for the
>UE10000 and SGI kept the technology that resulted in the Origin
>2000.

UE10000 is also known as "Starfire" (internal product name).

Cray Research had (atleast) two different product lines when SGI
bought it. The Super Computer line which was based on the DEC
Alpha chips aimed at the HPC market. And the Cray 6400 server
which was based on Sun SPARC chips and 100% binary compatible Solaris OS. They were positioning this at the commercial market but
were not successful. I heard they were selling 10s of systems
per year. At the time, SGI was #2 in the HPC market and bought
Cray with the intention on keeping and owning the HPC division.
Since then they have converted the HPC servers from Aplha to MIPS
technology.

With regards to the SPARC servers they felt, it was throw away technology. So they sold it to Sun for a throw away price of under
$20 million dollars (until very recently the I thought the price was
under $70million but the at the latest Sun shareholder meeting
I thought I heard Scott Mcnealy say it was for around $20 mil. Can somebody confirm this).

I don't know what SGI was thinking when they did this. But I can
only surmise that that they were overconfident in their own abilities
and under-estimated what Sun could do with this technology. What a
mistake it was. Sun is selling close to 500+ servers per year
and there is atleast a 3 month waiting list to get one of these
last time I checked.

>Do you know how well the Origin 2000 is doing in the commercial
>market/HPC market? I have seen 0 penetration of the Origin2000 as
>a Database server for DW or ERP - is the Origin2000 strictly for
>the HPC/technical marketplace? Is SGI trying to compete in these
>markets at all and why did they leave this technology for Sun?

I am not too well versed in their product names. I suppose you are
talking about the high-end SGI servers. Based on what I can tell
SGI has not had much sucess selling into commercial environments.

Having seen how hard it is for a company like Sun to shift gears
from serving a technical audience to commercial audience (Sun started this focus back in early 90's and Sun is
still learning the ropes by the way), SGI is too far off for
ISVs, customers, System Integrators to be taken seriously as
a commercial systems provider.

So at this time, most of the high-end SGI systems are being sold
into HPC environments. Other markets they may still have a chance
at would (Internet servers, Graphics etc). Until about a year ago
Internet server space was still a technology play. But as e-commerce
takes off, even those will be evaluating vendors on their ability
to support mission critical services like commercial customers.
So....
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