Читать реферат по английскому: "Silicon Graphics Essay Research Paper Silicon Graphics" Страница 2

(Назад) (Cкачать работу)

most advanced research and design units had discovered SGI technology.

British Aerospace and NASA, for example, use SGI workstations for product

design and flight simulation. Boeing Aircraft used SGI technology to essentially

"walk through" the on-screen plans for their new 777 aircraft,

achieving tolerances of less than a 1000th of an inch without paper plans.

Volkswagen is one of several automobile manufacturers to make similar

use of SGI workstations to design its automobiles, as well as to design

the process by which they are built.

Beginning in about 1988, when SGI began to place lower-end

workstations on the market, the company began a period of steady growth

of about 40 percent per year that lasted until the middle of 1995. By

then SGI’s annual revenues were in excess of $2 billion, and the

company employed more than 7,000 worldwide.

Clark resigned in 1994 to found Netscape with Marc

Andreessen. McCracken remains as chief executive to guide Silicon

Graphics at a time when intense competition, not the least of which comes

from his former employer HP, has begun to erode SGI’s market share

and threaten the company’s growth.

Hollywood Meets SGI

The best known of SGI’s customers have been the companies

that specialize in the production of 3-D effects for the Hollywood film

industry. In the early 1990s, film makers who often spent millions of

dollars on special effects that used extravagant models and stop-action

animation discovered what SGI’s 3-D technology could do. The result

of SGI’s encounter with Hollywood has been the kind of eye-popping

effects that were first seen in Jurassic

Park, and then in a string of blockbusters including Terminator

II, Star Trek, True

Lies, Batman

Forever, Casper

and Toy

Story. The technology behind 3-D effects can be as complex and

demanding as the most sophisticated industrial or research applications.

The computer generated ghost in Casper, for example, required storage

of 27 trillion bytes of data. At the level of capability required to execute

such programs, SGI has no equals. Therefore, the top 3-D effects production

firms in Hollywood and Silicon Valley rely almost exclusively on SGI workstations.

In mid 1995, SGI entered into agreements with Lucasfilm’s

Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and with Stephen

Spielberg’s, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s and David Geffen’s Dreamworks

to jointly develop systems to be used for computer animation. By 1996,

between 15 and 20 percent of SGI’s sales came from Hollywood and

the animation industry.

Strategy for Continuing Growth

In accordance with the vision of company founder Jim Clark,

and with the concrete strategy executed by Jim McCracken, SGI has succeeded

over the years in making advanced 3-D technology available at an increasingly

low price. This strategy has allowed the company to sustain a high level

of growth for nearly a decade by bringing a high level of 3-D capability

to institutions that could not have previously afforded it. But in spite

of Clark’s one-time ambition to ultimately move into the PC and home

market, SGI has elected to stay with its elite, high-margin niche. This

has caused some concern among shareholders that SGI will not be able to

find the new markets that will be required to sustain growth in an increasingly

competitive industry. Beginning around the third quarter of 1995, SGI’s

40% per year growth began to slow appreciably in the face of sharp competition.

Because SGI’s chip and architecture are specifically

geared toward 3-D application, its workstations will continue for some

time to offer 3-D capability superior to any found on general purpose

systems. In recent years, however, competitors have begun to offer very

high levels of 3-D capability for a fraction of the cost of even SGI’s

lowest-end workstations. Most PCs now come equipped with advanced 3-D

graphics. At the middle performance level, the two largest manufacturers

of high-end workstations, Hewlett Packard and Sun

Microsystems, are taking direct aim at SGI’s high-margin business.

By stacking two or four Pentium Pro chips in one PC and using relatively

cheap software based on Windows

NT, their newest systems deliver sufficient capacity to provide a

viable alternative for SGI machines costing five times as much.

In short, Although SGI remains unsurpassed at almost every

level of 3-D computing, competitors are closing the gap at the low and

middle levels by offering products that come progressively closer to SGI

quality for a fraction of the price. Even SGI’s most noted customers

in Hollywood have told sources they are looking into these alternatives

for at least some applications. Some industry experts expect the Windows

NT/Pentium Pro machines to continue to narrow the performance gap, leaving

Silicon Graphics with a shrinking niche market of those users who need

the most advanced graphics capabilities and can afford to pay for it.

Among those who question SGI’s long-term growth potential is company

co-founder and former chairman, Jim. Clark. In Clark’s words, "they

can own the high-end of the market — it just isn’t a very exciting

place to be."

In an effort to find new growth markets, SGI has initiated

some forays into consumer markets. The

Похожие работы