SGI CEO: x86 products to remedy bankruptcy

11.05.2006

The second piece is we're going into a new market that is enterprise. That is the biggest dollar spend, and we believe that our unique shared memory architecture in Altix has significant performance advantages for particular application areas and we will be launching that. As these enterprise customers are dealing with bigger data sets, they are not just looking for transactional improvements, they are looking for the ability to access it, analyze it and transform it to improve their decision-making and their overall competitive advantage.

The third piece is new products. With this large installed base that we have, we've been only addressing 20 percent of the overall spend. With the new products that we will be launching, we will be able to address 80 percent of that spend. What is that new product? x86. We are bringing out x86 products and we will be announcing that in mid-June.

What is the reason for moving into an x86 product, and will it still have shared memory capability? The initial products will not have the shared memory capability. This is to allow us to address a larger percentage of our customers' budget dollars within our installed base. If they have an opportunity to do more business with SGI, we believe that will be a preference.

What kind of products will you be delivering to the enterprise market? We will be launching this in a formal way, but just in the context of [the] Altix 4700 blade family with the Montecito [Intel Itanium] processor chip set -- which comes available in the July -- the combination of the Altix Montecito with shared memory, scalability [and] high bandwidth can produce 10 time-plus over existing solutions within particular application sets. I don't want to get into any more specifics.

In light of your recent action, will customers see any changes in support and service? None whatsoever. In fact, we realigned out sales and services organization so it would be more efficient and productive.