A note about the Rackable/SGI deal

Something to note about the Rackable/SGI deal announced this morning. Note that the title of SGI release is

SGI logoRackable Systems Announces Agreement to Acquire Silicon Graphics Inc.

But that farther down in the body of the release the text says this

…agreement to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc….

This difference between the headline and the body (which are often written by two different groups of people) could indicate that something less than a folding in of SGI lock, stock, and barrel is what is actually going to happen. Given the language I think there is a spectrum of possibility here that ranges from terminating all the staff and keeping the patents, to creating a separate division to hold all of SGI as is.

This language is reminiscent of the February 2008 language SGI used to announce that it was buying Linux Networx.

…announcement of its acquisition of the core assets of Linux Networx, Inc.

Clearly that deal ended up being at the Spartan end of the spectrum of possibilities.

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  1. […] West over at insideHPC has a good post up discussing the Rackable/SGI deal – rather than re-hash everything, I’d recommend you read through his […]

Comments

  1. Wonder if we finally can call the acquisition strategy of the DoD Mod program the harbinger of death to HPC big iron (LNXI, SGI). I can’t help but wonder if Cray Henry will finally get that they are not helping the industry.

    FJW

  2. Does anyone have any input in how SGI Federal is linked to all this? Do they still remain? I believe they split a section of SGI off several years ago to make sure that the DOD customers would still be supported if SGI went bust.

    http://www.sgi.com/company_info/federal/

  3. LNXI, SGIC, RACK… What is with the mergers of the former high fliers? It’s like a B movie with Hollywood has-beens.

  4. John West says

    FJW – LMAO.

  5. I think the point here is not that this is a merger of former high fliers – rather the acquirer views this as a way of getting more customers into their fold and thus increasing customer base/revenue in the subsequent years. Similar to the ‘objective’ of the purported IBM – SUN talks.

  6. Chris A. – Much of the compute side of HPC has been reduced to to bulk PC sales. Vendors like IBM and Dell slug it out over big orders and many of the smaller vendors survive off smaller implementations. This deal with SGI is just the latest bump in a long, unfortunate slide for them.

  7. I certainly hope that this works out well for both companies. In a sliding economic time, anything that will help a company continue to operations can only be seen as a positive. Having family who works for this company, I am excited about the possibility of them finally being able to stop worrying about employment. Rackable should consider moving a lot of the manufacturing to the Wisconsin area, cheaper labor is available and there is a skilled work force there from companies like Cray Research, Celestical and many former SGI employees as well who would welcome the opportunity to work in the tech industry again.