Cray profiled in Xconomy

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Xconomy Seattle has an article on hometown company Cray Inc. I wouldn’t automatically post a link to it, but this one is well written and provides a pretty good overview of the two ends of Cray’s current market strategy, from CX1 to XT*. Not much mention of the mid-range XT*m line, though. The author also covers some of the business fundamentals (like the recent debt buyback).

Cray logoThree business units are at the heart of Cray’s turnaround strategy. The first is “scalable systems,” its cash cow of high-end machines that cost $1 million and up. The second is what Ungaro calls “custom engineering.” This means taking individual supercomputing technologies—things like cooling systems, cabinets, and pieces of hardware or software—and selling them as professional services instead of delivering a complete supercomputer. And the third business unit is what he calls “productivity solutions”—a rather bland name for what amounts to a more mainstream kind of Cray machine, which sounds like an exciting growth area.

It’s worth a quick read if you have done business with them in the past but have lost track of what they are up to.