Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 18
Silicon Graphics Inc., or SGI, is one of the storied Silicon Valley names. Co-founded by Jim Clark (who later co-founded Netscape) in 1981, SGI was a pioneer in powerful desktop engineering workstations and, later, super-powerful servers. The company got hammered by Sun Microsystems and other competitors and became a shadow of its former self after the dot-com bust. It filed for bankruptcy in 2006, limped along in a zombie state, and then was picked up in May for about $25 million by Rackable Systems--which bought it out of a second bankruptcy proceeding. Rackable renamed itself Silicon Graphics International to squeeze the remaining brand equity out of the Silicon Graphics name. Mark Barrenechea, a former Oracle and CA executive who took over as CEO of Rackable in 2006, has the task of reviving a faded icon. "It's humbling to have this incredible brand under my stewardship," he told me recently.
He's got a terribly tough job. Only two tech icons have brushed with death and come back to become powerful factors in the industry again: Apple and IBM. One of Barrenechea's hurdles is the name itself. It cuts both ways. While there's brand equity in SGI, the name also has the odor of failure lingering around it. Do tech managers really want to buy from a faded icon? While SGI's 6000 existing customers may want to stick with the name they know and the technology they have adopted, it seems unlikely that new customers will rush to sign up.
So the value of the name is a question mark.
Barrenechea is depending on other factors, namely new product development and the trend winds, to power the new SGI forward. The trend winds are blowing in his direction. Rackable specialized in producing thousands of small computer servers that are mounted on racks in data centers--so it's benefiting from the growing popularity of cloud computing. On the product side, the new SGI is starting to deliver new computers that were already underway before the merger was completed, and which strengthen its hand in a couple of important markets.
First, a month ago, it introduced a new line of deskside supercomputers for use by university researchers, national laboratories, and product designers. These babies take up very little space (one foot by two feet) but pack up to 80 microprocessor cores.
Second, on Monday, the company announced a new generation of server products, called Altix UV, aimed at supercomputing applications, large-scale databases, and data analytics. The clustered machines take advantage of x86 processors, the Linux operating system, and shared memory--so they're economical. SGI hopes to differentiate itself with a proprietary and ultra-fast interconnect system linking the servers. This marks Barrenechea's attempt to keep SGI relevant in the high-performance computing market--where he hopes to collect 30% to 40% of the company's revenues.
SGI has a solid position in supercomputing. One of its systems, nicknamed Pleiades, located at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, ranked sixth on the Top500 semi-annual ranking of supercomputers that was released on November 15. Bill Thigpen, engineering branch chief in NASA's advanced supercomputing center at Ames, says he and his colleagues chose SGI's technology when they installed the machine last year because "we got the most computing for our dollar." Also, the supercomputing center provides shared services for all of NASA, so it needs general-purpose machines that can handle a wide variety of software. That's what SGI sells. Thigpen calls the merger of SGI and Rackspace a good marriage. "It's good for the industry. By having multiple vendors in the space, everybody benefits. And having multiple healthy vendors is even better," he says.
But the crowded competitive landscape is going to be a major challenge for SGI. It faces supercomputing giants HP and IBM, an on-rushing Dell, and a strong niche player in Cray, which captured two of the top three positions in the Top500 ranking. Sun Microsystems is fading, true enough. But in a business where size matters a lot, SGI will have a difficult time keeping up with the giants.
I don't know enough about SGI and its markets to expertly handicap its chances, but, based on what I know of the industry I'm going to have to wish Barrenechea luck. He'll need it.
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 16
I was pleased to get an e-mail message today from Online Colleges.Net telling me that Globespotting ranked in the top 10, overall, among blogs that appeal to international business students. Here's the list: http://tinyurl.com/ykvdamb
A lot of the people who post comments on Globespotting are angry about one thing or another, which, of course, disappoints me. I hope my blog can build bridges across cultures and continents.
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 09
Kiva.org has been one of my favorite social enterprises even since I started lending small amounts of money to poor entrepreneurs in developing nations a couple of years ago. To me, what was so compelling about it was you could read little stories about entrepreneurs then choose the one you want to back. At least that's what Kiva said was happening. Turns out, that was a fiction--in most cases. Instead, Kiva channels money to micro-finance organizations that have already made the loans. I read about this outrage today in a story in the New York Times. The person who exposed the fiction, David Roodman, laid out his findings in a blog posting. A more charitable person might forgive Kiva.org for misrepresenting how its model works. But not me. Social enterprises should be held to an even higher standard than are for-profit businesses--not a lower one.
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 04
One of the tough things about being a social entrepreneur, I'm told, is that it's lonely out there. Unlike regular entrepreneurs who can readily find other people in their geographic proximity and share ideas and experiences with them, social entrepreneurs tend to be widely scattered. They commune via social networks or at infrequent and typically short gatherings of the clan.
A group of four friends in Boulder, Colorado, has come up with an inventive way to address the loneliness of the social entrepreneur. These folks, founders of The Unreasonable Institute, have created a 10-week mini-MBA for promoters of social change. No, check that. The metaphor isn't quite right. That's because the 25 or so young entrepreneurs who participate in the program next summer won't just be learning the skills of social business; they'll be putting them to work, too. The idea is to come up with ideas, develop them into business plans, vet them, divide up a small pool of venture capital, and connect with a support network--all in the span of an intense 10 weeks. It's like packaging Silicon Valley in a box. "We want to give young social entrepreneurs the skills, training, and networks to help their ideas grow wings and create a lot of impact," says Tyler Hartung, the Institute's community tactician.
The four founders, all University of Colorado at Boulder grads, scan like a mini-United Nations. They refined their ideas for the Institute last summer when they were widely scattered: Teju Ravilochan in Boulder; Vladimir Dubovskiy in India; Daniel Epstein on a bike ride down the West Coast; and Hartung volunteering for a microfinance outfit in Uganda. "It was a most unreasonable time for our founding team," quips Hartung.
For sure, these guys are having almost too much of a good time, but their idea seems to be both ingenius and practical. All experienced social entrepreneurs themselves, they'll do a lot of the training in the program, but they're also planning on bringing in 50 mentors from around the world who are experts in everything from business formation and venture capital to international development and poverty alleviation.
The whole process gets started on Nov. 15, when they begin taking applications from people who want to be Unreasonable Fellows. (www.unreasonableinstitute.org) Applications close on Dec. 15 and a list of finalists will be posted on Dec. 20. Then it's time for philanthropists and social investors to get into the act. They'll vote with their dollars for the entrepreneurs who seem to be most promising, and every applicant who raises the $6,500 tuition by Jan. 31 that way will be invited to the summer program. "We want market forces to determine who will come," explains Hartung.
Now for my part: I'm supposed to help the group round up applicants and funders for the program. So, how about it?
Posted by: Steve Hamm on November 02
This is a relief. Alec Ross, one of the key architects of Barack Obama's technology policy during last year's campaign, isn't pushing ultra-high-tech solutions as a cure-all for the world's diplomatic and social problems now that he's senior adviser on innovation for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He's practicing the art of the practical.
Ross's job at State is to figure out how to use the global communications network to address poverty, health pandemics, human rights violations and the like. "With the ubiquity of our global networks, there are opportunities to engage with people that weren't possible in the past. We're practicing what I call 21st Century statecraft," he says. While he's supposed to use technology to accomplish Clinton's goals, "In some cases it's cutting edge. In other cases it's basic."
There's a temptation to fantasize that just because the opposition in Iran used Twitter so successfully during its brief uprising, the latest in social media can be spread around globally like some sort of super digital goo. So it's good to know that Ross is thinking in a more nuanced way. He gave me a couple of examples of calibrated responses to particular situations.
The low-tech solution: In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where nobody rules and militias run wild, one key issue is figuring out how to get militia members to quit fighting and return to peaceful living. Ross visited with former militia members in demobilization camps and asked them for their advice. What he heard back was that the authorities should use radio to communicate with fighters who are hiding out in the bush, since they all listen to it. The former fighters also suggested that they should be put on air. Fighters would listen to somebody else who had walked in their shoes. So now the State Department is putting together a radio outreach program. "We use 1920s technology if 1920s technology is the right solution," Ross says.
The high-tech solution: In Mexico, the State Dept. is working with the Mexican government, NGOs, and telecom companies to set up a system for tracking crimes. Right now, a big problem there is that citizens are afraid to report crimes for fear of reprisals--sometimes via police who are working with the thugs. So Ross and his collaborators are working on a cellphone-base tip-off system for the police that will scrub identifying information about the tipsters from the system. They're also planning on mapping out the activities of common criminals and narco-trafficantes in near real-time on Web sites, so citizens can see where to avoid. "We're bringing transparency to the activities of the bad guys and empowering citizens," says Ross.
