SGI suffers Sun stroke on university campus

Silicon Graphics' (SGI) presence in the Unix market has been hit by the loss of a #400,000 contract to supply universities in the north of England.

Leeds-based Sun reseller Esteem has won the contract to supply a range of Sun Ultra workstations and servers to the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University and the University of York, to replace SGI's Unix machines. Esteem is one of three Sun Academic Business Centres in the UK.

In April, SGI formed a strategic relationship with Intel and Microsoft and announced its first NT-based workstations would ship before the end of the year.

David Ogden, director of Sun operations at Esteem, said: 'Three or four years ago, SGI was top of the pile in the graphics-intensive workstation market, but Sun's more powerful general-purpose workstation has put it on the back foot.'

Ogden said the deal reflected the academic institutions' reluctance to move to NT. 'I wouldn't be surprised to see other universities follow the same path. NT does not offer the same scalability and resilience at the high end and users are unwilling to move to a different platform because of the system changes required,' he added.

An SGI representative denied the manufacturer lacked direction in the academic market. 'Our customers in this market have been tremendously supportive of our dual platform strategy,' he said.

The representative added that SGI would continue to offer Unix-based systems, primarily in the high-end server area, with the majority of low-end desktop products moving towards the NT platform.