Hot on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that SGI received a Nasdaq delisting notice, SGI has announced significant changes to its business plan, including the layoff of roughly 15% of its workforce (225 employees), including some executives and senior level positions.

According to the new announcement, SGI will focus its efforts around demands for computation, visualization and data management solutions:

Moving forward, the company intends to:

• Maintain its focus on delivering solutions that meet the evolving requirements of customers
• Adapt its business plan to today’s economic reality
• Eliminate costs that are not aligned with the refined business plan
• Implement more efficient and streamlined international sales and service coverage via strong channel partnerships, as it has already done in Japan and Korea
• Continue investment in key technologies for the future including its next-generation server products, visualization software and the Industrial Strength Linux Environment.

It’s unclear from the announcement if SGI has any plans to enter the Cloud Computing market as Sun Microsystems announced earlier this week, although it could potentially be a good move for the company given its similarity in business structure to Sun.  Both SGI and Sun product Unix and Linux-based operating systems, large-scale server equipment, and also provide large network management and storage services.

SGI’s servers and software are primarily aimed at the enterprise, large company market today, but their solutions could be very useful to smaller and medium businesses looking to increase efficiency at a reasonable cost.  Providing some of the solutions that SGI has today in a consumable fashion for small and medium enterprises, especially in a SaaS or pay-as-you-go model could attract businesses currently ignored by other vendors, giving much needed momentum to SGI’s brand and product line.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Web, SaaS