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Commodity hardware design, build, and manufacturing are at the bottom of the value cycle today. We need a new success framework. Joint Business Management meets Joint Design Manufacturing.
Compute and Storage OEM companies tend to follow an ancient cycle.
- Design custom hardware to meet specific market requirements
- Shift to a commodity strategy that works on “white-box.”
- Standardized equipment across platforms to maximize returns
- Struggle with new workload and software demands that require specialized hardware designs to keep up. Ever-expanding and more complex use cases overwhelm stale plans. 5G, Edge, Automotive as business models. GPU, FPGA, PCIe Gen 5, and fabrics as technological models.
- Specify “helpful” design suggestions to ODM and EMS companies. The intent is to avoid non-recurring engineering, “NRE,” costs while leading vendors on with potential project awards
- Give up trying to get vendors on board and create new products. Locking them down as proprietary and complaining about costs
Hyperscale and Cloud companies are now learning the OEM lesson. They turned datacenter models upside-down with commodity deployment strategies and management. Now they require specific hardware designs too. Fighting the…
