Cray Shedding Pricey Image in India

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Cray logoCray has recently taken an interesting turn in expanding its reach into new and burgeoning markets.  One such market is India.  Being that they are one of the few remaining HPC-centric companies worldwide, they have a unique ability to focus internal efforts solely on developing new technology for the HPC masses.  Much of this new development has been aimed at lowering the entry cost into a Cray platform and subsequently shedding a stereotype that Cray is simply too expensive for the HPC you-and-me.

A year ago this week, we covered news that Cray was launching an Indian subsidiary to handle sales and service in the new market.  Around the same time, Cray lost a large [$28million US] deal to IBM at the Indian ministry of Earth Sciences.  According to the source article, the deal was lost mainly on price, which likely left a sour taste in the mouths at Cray.  According to Cray officials in India, they’re making a concerted effort to prevent this from happening in the future.

Even though we have been present in India for long, having installed machines ranging from $100,000 to $4 million, we were not forceful (in the market). Now we are going to be; we are giving up our pricey tag and becoming more affordable,” says Sudhakar Yerneni, country manager, Cray Supercomputers (India) Pvt. Ltd.

Cray has quite an uphill battle ahead of them.  Dell, HP and IBM have firms holds in both traditional IT markets and HPC [cluster] deployments within India.  Its always very difficult unseating the successful incumbent.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out the source article here.