Though the company registered a revenue of Rs 78 crore in its last fiscal ending June 1998, its Indian subsidiary lost about Rs 15 crore on account of the blacklisting of a number of defence, research and education organisations and establishments which were traditional customers of Silicon Graphics machines.

The loss on this account in the present fiscal, however, is expected to be slightly lower as the company is keen to shift focus to other areas, said managing director Ashok Desai. It expects to end the year with sales of about Rs 80 crore.

The four-year-old subsidiary, Silicon Graphics Systems (India) Ltd has found succor in the emerging internet providers market and hopes to get at least 35 per cent of the internet market in the computer parts business. It claims to enjoy 31 per cent of the market in Unix graphics workstations.

However, Desai was non-committal on the revenue ISP opportunity will generate for the company. ``It is difficult to gauge since we as well as most of the ISPs are still in the planning stage only. It will take at least two months to talk about any serious, tangible numbers,'' he told The Financial Express.

``Moreover, in the ISP market, many telecom players will get into the business and would want to retain their existing suppliers, particularly in the switching and routing equipment,'' he added.

The company expects ISP market to form about 10 per cent of the company's total revenue in its fiscal ending July 1999 and rise further in the next.

Silicon Graphics is negotiating with the potential ISPs for offering its servers and networking equipment. Though it lost out on a big opportunity of selling to MTNL which is expected to emerge as one of the leading players in the internet, Silicon Graphics has made presentations to several other important ISP companies, including Bharti BT Telenet and Datapro.

It is optimistic about bagging a number of orders from the companies in the category 1 and category 2 circles, particularly those with over 5,000 connections.

Speaking at a press conference earlier, Desai said SGI technology would provide security, scalability and 100 per cent fail-safe uptime.

Globally, 50 per cent of the sales of SG come from ISPs, 25 per cent from corporate internets and 15 to 20 per cent each from commercial internet site developers and content creators.

Among Silicon Graphics' international ISP customers are names like America Online, Netscape, US West, AT&T, Hiway Technologies, GTE, MCI and Bell Atlantic. Its machines power five of the top websites in the world.

Quoting the IDC figues, vice president (Asia-Pacific) of Silicon Graphics Inc Jansen Ek said ISPs comprised one third of all internet server shipments globally. The figures are expected to grow six times in next year or two. Of all the countries in Asia-Pacific, India is expected to register maximum growth after China, he pointed out.

With the sanctions continuing, NT-based range is the other segment from which the company hopes to garner much of its revenue in the present fiscal. It is a few weeks away from launching its much-talked about product Wintel, a NT based product. Expected to be launched in December, Wintel is expected to form a big component of Silicon Graphics' Indian revenues as well.

Prior to sanctions, Silicon Graphics was selling several low-end desktop machines to organisations like BHEL, Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Science, besides supercomputing machines to several defence research and development organisations such as Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bhabha Atomic research Centre and other air force and navy wings. ``There are several very generic names in the blacklist of the US department of commerce who were our traditional customers and the ban has obviously hit us badly,'' said Desai.