The Palo Alto, California-based company said its differentiation in the competitive commodity switch market would be a global supply chain that extends across more than 160 countries and a smorgasbord of support and consulting services.
Internet giants, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which operate massive data centers around the world, have found it more effective to design their own hardware and have so-called “Original Design Manufacturers,” the likes of Taiwan’s Quanta and Foxconn, manufacture it for them. The trend has created a problem for incumbent IT vendors, such as HP, Dell, IBM, and Cisco, which found themselves competing with contract manufacturers of their products for the same high-volume deals.
Facebook, through its Open Compute Project, has spread awareness about cost effectiveness of this IT procurement model, and there is now growing interest in low-cost commodity hardware among enterprises who are not necessarily Internet giants, creating a new threat to the incumbents’ market share. Facebook started with servers, but now, it has also designed its own network switch and plans to contribute that design to OCP like it has with its server designs.
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