SGI Steps into Web Services World

SGI, perhaps better known as Silicon Graphics Inc. , on Monday took steps
in hopes to continue its evolution from being just a visual graphics
workstation supplier to a major player in the enterprise solutions market.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which 30 years ago practically
created the computer graphics industry, has partnered up with Waltham,
Mass.-based IONA to incorporate IONA’s Orbix E2A Web Services Integration
Platform to SGI’s array of advanced visualization and high-performance
computing systems. Orbix E2A leverages Web
services standards and service-oriented architectures to provide an
open, low-cost integration solution.

The move comes after wave after wave of reinvention for SGI. In recent
years, the hardware company adopted Linux-OS support and most recently has
refocused its marketing efforts on military and defense spending, which rely
on the company’s high-end systems for missile and flight simulation. Defense
spending now accounts for most of SGI’s new revenue.

But SGI is also facing an ever-increasing amount of competition. And the
encroachment is no longer coming from the usual suspects, IBM Corp. and Sun
Microsystems Inc. . In fact, given the added processing power and graphical
capabilities provided by companies like Nvidia and ATI Technologies, today’s
PC now has the abilities to reproduce the work of the SGI engineer’s
workstation of a few years ago.

That has left the company racing to concentrate on larger enterprise
customers. And analysts agree the best way to help larger enterprise
customers is to more tightly integrate their various proprietary systems and
enable the data to interoperate between them.

Under terms of today’s alliance, IONA is providing optimized integration
between Orbix E2A and SGI systems. This integration will allow customers to
more easily capture and utilize business logic and application components
stored in disparate systems across their enterprise for use with SGI data
management and visualization products, services and solutions.

“Many of our customer and partner engagements involve massive integration
projects, where our hardware, software and
multi-media systems must be incorporated into some of the world’s largest
and most complex IT enterprises,” said Knut Korsell, vice president of
industry marketing at SGI. “Orbix E2A can address any integration
requirement.”

In addition to optimized product integration, today’s alliance provides for
joint marketing and selling activities, and the sharing of technical and
engineering resources to ensure seamless integration in customer
engagements.