SGI spreads its network in India

The company has appointed Redington as its national distributor to appoint
tier two partners and plans to have an R&D center in India too

With an aggressive focus on Indian hiperformance com-puting market, Silicon
Grap-hics Systems (India) (SGI) is now planning to add a widespread network of
tier two channel partners for the Indian market. To give proper guidance on
this, the company has appoin-ted Redington (India) as its master partner or
national distributor.

Prasad Medury, MD, SGI, said, "Our major focus in 2005 will be on bigger
cities where science and research market is hot. For complete market pen-etration,
we are closely working on to create a strong network of tier two channel
partners who will take our business to our targeted customers. To achieve this,
Redington is going to assist us in establishing the channel network. We are
expecting good business results from this upcoming network of tier two channel
partners."

Talking about the size of the market in India, Prasad said, "There is no
IDC data available for the HPC market segment in India. But an estimated figure
shows market size of $350 to 400 million. Out of this, we have a market share of
10 percent in India."

He also added that they have five tier one partners, who cover almost all the
regions of India. With a dual business module, they sell directly as well as
through partners.

In India SGI is targeting verticals like scientific institu-tes, oil and gas
companies, manufacturing companies and government authorities that are related
to the mentioned segments.

Elaborating on the require-ment for tier two channel partners, Prasad said,
"We would be interested in those partners who have some expe-rience in our
targeted market. They should not be very new to the technical and research based
industry. Identifying geographies in our business would also be a key area for
selecting the channel partner."

Robert Bishop, Chairman and CEO of SGI said, "India is aggressively
becoming a hub for scientific research and has all the major requirements like
talent, manpower, latest tech-nology and awareness. But the country is lacking
in the availability of tools to achieve this success." He added that they
want to assist Indian engineers and researchers to help do their work with more
speed and accuracy. The company is looking forward to have its R&D activity
being done from India.

Presently, SGI has its R&D centers based in the US, Australia and Israel.
"We have close to 700 people working in all these R&D centers
world-wide and this figure is also likely to grow as we move forward,"
Robert said. "We are looking forward to doubling our market share in India
within the next five years time," he added.

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