On November 2, 1993, Silicon Graphics, Inc. announced that it has entered into a strategic Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) relationship with Tandem Computers Incorporated for the distribution of Silicon Graphics servers and workstation products. Tandem Computers intends to market Silicon Graphics' products worldwide as part of its own strategic product line. The two companies expect the agreement to be worth in excess of $100 million in sales for Silicon Graphics over the next two years.
The agreement includes Silicon Graphics' symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) Challenge(tm) servers, which Tandem will market under its own label, and the Indigo(r) workstation product family. Silicon Graphics' products are based on the MIPS(r) RISC processor architecture, which Tandem has incorporated into its product lines for more than three years.
"Silicon Graphics' strategy is to extend our powerful SMP server technology into commercial markets through strategic OEM relationships with companies such as Tandem," said Edward R. McCracken, president and CEO of Silicon Graphics. "Tandem's strength in commercial markets which require industry-leading performance will further establish Silicon Graphics' systems and the MIPS architecture as the standard for RISC-based processing in the workplace.""Tandem's strategic relationship with Silicon Graphics positions Tandem to take a leadership role in the commercial UNIX marketplace," said James G. Treybig, president and CEO of Tandem. "Our binary-compatible line of UNIX systems provides a broad range of price/ performance and availability choices that are very appealing to customers transitioning to open client/server distributed architectures."
Tandem will distribute the highly scalable Challenge line, including the Challenge XL(tm) enterprise server, the Challenge L(tm) departmental deskside server and the Challenge M(tm) network resource server as its Integrity Network Resource (NR) servers: the NR/4436, NR/4412 and NR/4001. These products offer unmatched price/performance and are targeted at a variety of applications such as relational databases, network management and messaging for the financial and telecommunications markets. In conjunction with its new Integrity systems, Tandem will market the Indigo product family of desktop workstations as client systems to the commercial marketplace.
Tandem Computers Incorporated is the leader in online transaction processing, fault tolerance and enterprise networks. The company, headquartered in Cupertino, California, manufactures, markets, and provides services and systems ranging from the desktop to the data center, as well as software and related products to deliver complete customer solutions. Tandem is a Fortune 500 company with offices worldwide.
