GOVERNMENT

In a joint effort to grow revenues from the sale of 64-bit Linux solutions to government agencies at all levels, Silicon Graphics and GTSI Corp. today announced an agreement establishing GTSI as a front line government channels supplier providing SGI solutions to federal, state and local government customers. The alliance ensures SGI and its strategic resellers easy access to GTSI's numerous resources, including its existing government contracts and buying vehicles, its extensive government sales administrative expertise, and its broad knowledge of government customer requirements. The new alliance also gives GTSI, which will develop an enhanced Line of Business including additional technical and sales support, a more streamlined process for providing government customers with SGI's proven Linux OS-based solutions for real-time computing and visualization, and complex data management. "GTSI has set the standard for creating market awareness and demand in the government space, from the highest federal levels straight through to local agencies and departments," said Anthony Robbins, president, SGI Federal. "This new alliance offers an opportunity to realize incremental sales to government accounts at all levels, not only for SGI but for many of its resellers. Government users who are increasingly seeking out proven, scalable, and flexible Linux solutions can now capitalize on the unique combination of strengths formed in this new bond between GTSI, SGI, and SGI's strategic resellers." SGI systems already are popular in national laboratories, research facilities, defense agencies, and government contractor corporations, and the company's solutions are frequently acquired on the state level by universities and other government organizations. But with the availability of more affordable and deployable SGI servers, storage arrays and visualization systems, SGI systems are increasingly compelling for smaller government agencies, departments or workgroups. That, combined with the growing acceptance of Linux systems at all levels of government, presents significant opportunities for the expanded relationship with GTSI. "We view this as a way to strengthen the relationship between our two companies while providing our customers - at all levels of government as well as systems integrators and resellers - with the configuration support, contract portfolio, and solid solutions that they have come to expect from GTSI," said Dendy Young, GTSI's Chairman and CEO. "This relationship enables our end-user customers to access new and powerful solutions to solve real world problems today and tomorrow. We already operate as a very efficient, government-savvy distribution resource for partners like those in SGI's existing reseller base." SGI Altix servers and supercomputers and the Silicon Graphics Prism family of visualization systems are based on industry-standard technologies, and offer users their choice proven 64-bit Linux operating environments, including Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 4.0. SGI servers and visualization systems also tightly integrate with SGI InfiniteStorage disk arrays and storage area network solutions. GTSI and its allied partners will be able to resell all SGI solutions.