HP, Dell, Cisco Face Threat of Cheap Servers From Their Suppliers - Businessweek

Perhaps some server vendors are ready to unfriend the Open Compute Project

"The risk of relying on another company to make your product is that at some point it will start selling its own version without you, at a discount. Now it’s happening to Silicon Valley, as contract manufacturers that tech companies rely on to build high-end computing hardware sell servers directly to customers. In some cases, the manufacturers are making use of the Open Compute Project, a collection of relatively cheap, energy-efficient data center designs shared online by a group of companies, led by Facebook (FB). This has been a boon for customers that need lots of inexpensive servers—such as Facebook—and bad for established IT brands such as Cisco Systems (CSCO), Dell, and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)."

HP, Dell, Cisco Face Threat of Cheap Servers From Their Suppliers - Businessweek