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The United States Department of Commerce (DOC) recognized Silicon Graphics for its outstanding export market expansion by awarding the company the DOC Export Achievement Certificate. The award was presented in a ceremony held in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, the site of SGI's manufacturing facility. The company will be given the award as an example of how U.S. firms can "in- source" their high-value manufacturing and successfully compete throughout the world while manufacturing their products solely in the United States. Fewer than 100 of these certificates are given annually. After touring SGI's state-of-the-art Chippewa Falls plant, Bruce Blakeman, Special Counsel to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, will present the DOC Export Achievement Certificate to Dick Harkness, vice president of manufacturing operations, SGI, before an audience of SGI employees and members of the media. "The Department of Commerce congratulates SGI on its exporting successes," said Bruce Blakeman, Special Counsel to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. "SGI is manufacturing world-class, innovative products in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and successfully competing around the world. When U.S. firms increase their exports, they help build a stronger American economy and increase global economic prosperity." "Consolidating into a single plant structure and a single Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has allowed SGI to get tighter control over its supply chain, its work in progress, and its global inventories. This has significantly reduced our costs and had a positive effect on SGI's financials over the last three years," said Warren Pratt, executive vice president and chief operating officer, SGI. "This increased efficiency enables us to put 13% of our revenue back into our research and development effort -- more than most companies -- thus ensuring that SGI products are the absolute best high- performance computing and visualization technology available and that they will continue to meet America's and the world's needs far into the future." "This is a great honor for all of us at SGI. We are extremely gratified to receive this recognition of our expanding export successes from the U.S. Department of Commerce," said Dick Harkness, vice president of manufacturing operations, SGI. "In an increasingly competitive global marketplace SGI is proud to be cited as a 21st century leader in American manufacturing competitiveness. The strategy of having manufacturing, quality control and final assembly of high-performance computer systems in close proximity to our R&D facilities has allowed SGI to get high-quality products, purpose-built for the very demanding technical market." SGI closed its European and Far East manufacturing facilities during the past few years, consolidating all such activities back to the U.S. in Chippewa Falls; 90% of all manufacturing employees and functions are located centrally in the single facility. "The average manufacturing employee has over 12 years experience with SGI products and technology," added Harkness. "We have made a conscious decision to in-source our value-add elements and leverage our employees' expertise and passion in support of our customers." Building on 22 years of supercomputing and visualization expertise, SGI products and solutions are purpose-built to address the massive data environments facing scientific, engineering and creative customers. Only SGI builds systems that can compute, store and manage massive amounts of complex data and make this data available to the user through high-performance visualization. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century, satisfying the technical and creative computing needs of the rapidly expanding number of international customers in government and defense, manufacturing, the sciences, energy and media industries. The Export Achievement Certificate is given by the Department of Commerce in recognition of a company's export excellence and use of the Commerce Department's services to dramatically increase export sales or open new international markets. A small sampling of recent examples of increased SGI export sales of U.S. manufactured supercomputers and visualization technologies in international markets around the world include: The Beijing Planetarium will open the first-ever all-laser dome installation in the world. SGI was contracted to install the SGI Onyx family visualization system connected to Zeiss Laser All-Dome projectors to supply the real-time graphics supercomputing system that allow users to navigate through huge science data sets on-the-fly to create a different show for each performance. The Beijing Planetarium will be used as a flagship facility during the 2008 Summer Games ceremonies in Beijing, People's Republic of China. British Gas Exploration and Production India Ltd., (BGEPIL) and Instituto Venezolano del Petroleo SA (INTEVEP) have invested in SGI Altix servers and supercomputers to maximize production from some of the world's largest deposits of oil and gas in India and Venezuela. Grupo Antolin, with a presence in 18 countries and known as leaders in the design and production of a wide range of components for the automobile industry, purchased a four-processor SGI Altix 350 system with 4GB of RAM and 20 Silicon Graphics Fuel visual workstations. Danish Broadcasting Corporation purchased an SGI Origin 300 server and SGI Media Server for broadcast system that allowed its sports and news teams to cover the Athens Games with a smaller clone extension of its entirely SGI designed and SGI Media Server for broadcast-based digital workflow environment in Copenhagen. In a major upgrade to their research facilities, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, and Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, acquired several compute, visualization, and storage solutions from SGI to establish immersive SGI Reality Center facilities for medical visualization and other research.