SGI to expand Indian workforce

NEW DELHI: SGI worldwide chairman and CEO Robert Bishop, who is on a trip to

India, was all praise for Indian technical expertise. Addressing a press

gathering in Delhi, he said, "We at SGI in Silicon Valley are increasing

the number of Indians in our organization." He said the company is

currently evaluating options of how to recruit more Indians from India, and then

take them to the US. "The entire world appreciates the talent here and

India is being recognized as a technological powerhouse globally. This is a

great position to be in." Talking about SGI's relationship with India, he

said, "Our partnership with India will entail high quality tools from us in

the hands of highly capable people."

SGI, India, MD Prasad V Medury hinted that the company might set up a

development center in India. "The options are open before us. We might

recruit people in India and take them to the US or set up a facility here. With

the latter, managing projects becomes a bit of a problem." The primary

areas that Indians excel in, he noted, are engineering, research and

development, and software development, among others.

Bishop also spoke at length about the new emerging area of 'media commerce'

i.e., interactive content streamed over the Internet and what role SGI will have

to play in the new digital economy. "This new story is about big amounts of

online data. As we move to broadband, there will be no dearth of bandwidth, but

the main question will be how this huge amount of data will be managed. When

content becomes interactive, stacking and racking many PCs will not serve the

purpose. SGI is building its expertise in this space and will provide high

performance infrastructure that is modular, flexible with multi-dimensional

scalability."

He added, "In all this, we don’t want to ignore the roots of our

company, i.e., technical computing. What is common between these two spheres is

that they both need to manage large amounts of data."

Talking about the Linux movement, Bishop said that SGI is promoting a second

product line based on the Intel architecture and Linux. "Apart from our

existing MIPS/IRIX combination, which is a robust and mature system, we would

also like to concentrate on Linux." After a certain period, he noted,

"we would like both products to have a 50-50 share in SGI's total

business."