Demand from emerging markets such as Russia and China for white-box servers directly supplied from ODMs has been increasing, pushing related ODMs to accelerate their paces on establishing full product lineups, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.
Because of the US government's PRISM surveillance program, many Internet players in emerging markets are planning to establish in-house datacenters, boosting demand for datacenter hardware and bringing new business opportunities to Taiwan-based white-box server ODMs, the sources said.
North America is still a major battlefield for white-box server ODMs in 2015, but the ODMs have started looking for opportunities elsewhere as the competition from Hewlett-Packard (HP) and local system integrators in the region has grown fierce, the sources noted.
The sources pointed out that Internet players in emerging markets are not able to place orders of scales similar to those of Google or Facebook, and prefer ODMs with R&D and manufacturing abilities for customized server designs. But their orders are still a strong contribution for ODMs.
Taiwan-based server ODM AIC joined the supply chain of a Russia's Internet service firm in 2014 and the maker's revenues in the year grew 30% annually. AIC is expected to see a further on-year revenue growth in 2015 with its first-quarter revenues estimated to grow 70% on year.
For the China market, Inventec and Mitac have formed partnerships with local system integrators to push into the local cloud computing industry. In addition to orders from large Internet player such as Alibaba, Inventec has also been pushing integrated software-hardware solutions and established datacenters in Chongqing, China.
Article translated by Joseph Tsai
