Two big announcements from the old mainstay of graphics came out this week. SGI announced their latest quarterly earnings, showing a nice growth in revenue, but also a surprising amount of expenses for a company locked in R&D spending.
For the full fiscal 2011 year, SGI’s revenues came to $629.6m, up 56 per cent, and the company shrank its net loss to $21.2m, which worked out to a loss of 69 cents per share. By comparison, in fiscal 2010, SGI had lost $88.9m, or $2.92 per share.
But that’s not all: In a surprising move to the CFD community, SGI helped themselves to a nice handful of popular open-source CFD simulation package OpenCFD. OpenCFD has been around for 1970, actively developed and the latest version OpenFoam 2.0.1 just came out a few weeks ago. Now SGI owns it and plans to better integrate it into their own software stack:
CFD is a big sales driver for SGI, and the idea that CEO Mark Barrenechea has for OpenFoam is not all that different from the idea that his old boss, Larry Ellison, had when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in January 2010. Barrenechea said that SGI would provide “the market’s first fully integrated CFD solution, where all the hardware and software work together”. That sure sounds like an Oracle “hardware-software-complete” sales pitch.
While much of SGI’s business recently has been pretty new territory, this move is classic SGI. SGI has a long history of “integrating” Software stacks into their own products, from old Irix and SGIMPI libraries to special load balancing and performance analysis packages. Added a simulation package to the mix is just the next logical step, and could prove a huge boon to their bottom line.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn out like Alias, Cray, or Intergraph..
via SGI (almost) doubles sales, (almost) halves losses • The Register.
