Ungaro is a home-grown success story

Cray Inc., the company synony- mous with supercomputing, has a new leader; Rogers High School graduate Peter Ungaro.

Ungaro, 36, was appointed chief executive officer last week. He takes over a company with an unmatched name and reputation for making machines that do everything from weather forecasting to managing the U.S. nuclear stockpile to mapping human genomes.

But Seattle-based Cray is also a company that has lost money last year, and will again this year.

In June, Cray announced a restructuring that includes, among other things, a 10 percent reduction in a work force of 900 engineers, salespeople and administrators.

“We’re leaving no stone unturned,” says Ungaro, who was hired away from IBM just two years ago. He expects Cray to return to profitability next year.

Ungaro’s rise to one of the plum positions in computing has been nearly as fast as one of Cray’s Red Storm computers, which crunch numbers at the rate of about 15 trillion calculations per second.

He graduated from Washington State University in 1990 with a business degree, and went to work for the Westin Hotel chain in New Orleans. He checked out within one year, joining the IBM support team in the Tri-Cities, where he worked with clients like Pacific Northwest National Laboratories.

Ungaro can sell. And sell. He rolled up numerous awards, and led the team that made what were then the two largest sales ever of IBM supercomputers. By March 1996, Ungaro was managing a Washington, D.C., team selling IBM servers to the federal government. He became an IBM vice president in early 1999, ultimately overseeing the company’s global high-performance computing sales from an office on North River Drive in Spokane.

“I was running a $2 billion business,” Ungaro says. But, he adds, “It was time to move on.”

When Cray came calling in September 2003, he says he figured there was little further quick advancement ahead at IBM for someone in just his mid-30s. He also wanted to take on responsibilities beyond those related to sales and marketing.

He was hired by Cray co-founder Jim Rottsolk, the man he replaced as president in March, and CEO last week. “He’s a great guy,” Ungaro says, one he feels privileged to follow.

That, and the stature of the Cray name, add to the pressure to succeed, Ungaro says. “At Cray, it’s really just you, your brand and your product.”

He says it helps that, in contrast to the awesome complexity of its machines, the company itself is simple. Cray designs, builds, sells and services supercomputers. Period.

But the supercomputing business is no longer just IBM vs. Cray. Several companies, Liberty Lake-based LLIX among them, are creating computer clusters that can match some supercomputer capabilities.

And, as Ungaro knows too well, IBM has a depth of resources Cray cannot hope to match.

“I caused my own problems,” he says, by so successfully taking market share from Cray with Big Blue’s supercomputers.

Along the way, however, the former business major also picked up the depth of computer knowledge that helped him reach the position Ungaro is in today, one that for him puts the international in Spokane International Airport.

He leaves his Liberty Lake home Monday morning and usually does not return until Friday. He may be headed to Cray offices in Seattle, Minneapolis, Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Vancouver, B.C., or to client visits anywhere in the world. Direct flights to Sea-Tac and Minneapolis from Spokane simplify what might otherwise be an impossible commute.

When people find out where he is from, Ungaro says, the responses are typically “Where’s Spokane?” followed by “When are you moving?”

He’s not. Ungaro rattles off his progression through Spokane’s schools — “Cooper, Shaw, Rogers” — and notes that his wife is also a Spokane native.

Ungaro says he regrets how little time he can devote to the community. When home in Liberty Lake, he dedicates his time to raising a 7-year-old daughter and 3-year-old twin boys.

Few other communities could afford the Ungaros the same lifestyle, he says. “There’s nothing like being on our deck overlooking the lake.

“We really love Spokane.”

Now, that computes.