Greg Estes: We have an awesome culture here. When we lost our momentum we attracted a lot of people that were interested in helping SGI. Now that things have improved, we’re attracting another crowd of people.
We have a reputation as a great place to work. Maybe I’m not objective about this. Once you’ve worked with Steven Spielberg and Stephen Hawking and people who change the world, it becomes difficult to think about going to work for some search engine.
13. How long have you been with SGI?
Greg Estes: I’ve been with the company for 12 years. I originally came here to be the “video-guy” working with the HDTV initiative. Then I went on to be a project manager with the Onyx line. After that I went on to high-end graphics and high-end broadband applications.
14. What’s on your desktop?
Greg Estes: Right now I have an SGI 1600W Flat Panel and a Dell laptop. The laptop is running NT4 with service pack five. Words can’t describe how much I hate it. I’m more of a Mac and IRIX fan. Sales and Marketing people are typically using Windows 2000 or NT.
For our own product line, SGI is now a Microsoft-free environment. We’ve discontinued our money losing IA32 product line, where we never should have been in the first place. We can’t compete with giant companies in that market. You’d think that would have been obvious to us, but it wasn’t. The margins are brutal. The competition is good enough, and you can be out distributed and out marketed by Dell. Besides, on NT you can’t innovate, at least not like you can on IRIX or even Linux.
15. I remember seeing an Origin in a server room one time. People were gathering around the thing to get a look.
Greg Estes: Yeah, we make good machines. Our workstations are consistently rated the best.
16. Do SGI engineers swagger around the halls?
Greg Estes: Not just inside SGI. It really happens with our customers. If you’ve got a $200, 000 SGI Onyx machine as your machine, you’re damn good at your job. I’ve been to post-production houses where they’ve got their Onyx in the lobby in a plexi-glass booth, where it’s lit from underneath and it looks great. It’s a point of pride for them, a sign that they are a contender.
17. SGI customers are different?
Greg Estes : Our customers are probably similar in devotion to the Mac users that Apple has. I don’t think that people walk down the halls where they work and high five each other saying, “Hey, I just got a Dell!” It just doesn’t have the any ring, does it?
18. What kind of representation does SGI have in Comp/Sci programs or at technical colleges?
Greg Estes: Here’s two answers to that question: It’s really, really good, and it’s almost non existent. Depending on what the CS program is geared towards. If you’re in a CS program that has an emphasis on graphics and modeling SGI is all over the place. Whereas you won’t find us at a school that promotes what students really need to understand basic networking and IT infrastructure. You can find SGI being used at McGill University and Sheridan College, or at Stanford University where they’re trying to break new ground in medical imaging. A lot of schools don’t have much money to spend and there’s a lot of competition because it’s not a big market. Kyoto University recently bought a 768 CPU machine for bio-informatics. I would suspect that there are 10 times as many places that don’t have SGI machines set up than places that do.
But, it really is important that we maintain a good reputation with kids coming out of schools. We have an educational discount program, to drive those programs into the educational committee.
19. Would it be out of line to call SGI a boutique computer company?
Greg Estes: We’re probably the world’s only $1.5 Billion computer company. It seems that computer makers are either huge or somewhat smaller than us, say in the area of $400 million. In the broader market, it’s important that we stay focused on our core customers.
Because of our specialties we can’t be considered a baby version of HP or IBM. And nobody here has any interest in working for HP or IBM. Or Sun, God forbid. Those companies are trying to solve different problems for their customers. In some IT situations decisions might go MS, then Sun, then MS and then back to Sun and then back again. But when a CIO or CTO makes a decision to use SGI and IRIX they’re making a clear decision to build a genuine advantage. They use SGI at the core of their business. We are at the strategic strikezone of our customers.
20. Who are your core customers now?
Greg Estes: We target five specific markets or industries: 1)Defense and Government 2)The Collective Sciences: bio-informatics, chemistry, medical imaging. 3)Manufacturing, the automotive industry and aerospace industry. We have 17/17 of the top automakers as customers 4)Media, Hollywood, but also Network television for such things as media serving, digital asset management and on-air graphics for special events like the Olympics or in the production of virtual sets. 5) The Energy industry, which is more or less the Oil&Gas industry. This is a good example of the importance of turning raw data into good decisions. When you’re deciding where to drill your next well you want to be right, because that can be a $45 Million mistake.
We have an impressive array of customers who prefer our products. Jaron Lanier , a pioneer in virtual reality development does a high percentage of his work on SGI machines. Stephen Hawking is a reference customer of ours. Anyone can look at what our customers are doing in post production and the whole digital image revolution.
21. Is that the SGI elevator speech?
Greg Estes: Sort of. This could be redundant. At SGI our focus is on just technical and creative customers in five markets: government and defense, sciences, manufacturing, media and energy, in the areas of high-performance computing, visualization and complex data management where they gain insight from data. Our customers use SGI at the core of their business. We are at the strategic strikezone of our customers.
- "First Part of the Interview"
- "Second Part of the Interview"
- "Third Part of the Interview"
