How An Unknown Taiwanese Server Maker Is Eating The Big Guys’ Lunch

Summary: In the server business, Taiwanese hardware company Quanta has shifted from an original-design manufacturer to much more of a direct seller. It wants to extend the trend and sell other products, too.

It all started, Mike Yang says, with a conversation he had with Facebook’s vice president of technical operations in 2007 or 2008. Rather than source servers through a traditional vendor like IBM for its data centers, Facebook turned to Quanta.

Back then, Quanta didn’t sell servers directly to customers, it only built them for traditional server vendors who then put their name on them and sold them to customers. Fast forward a few years, and a majority of Quanta’s server revenue stems from direct deals — 65 percent in 2012, and a forecasted 85 percent this year. Now, it counts other large-scale server buyers such as Rackspace among its customers.

Yang, the man in charge of Quanta’s cloud computing business unit, beamed during an interview on Thursday as he spoke about how the company can directly offer energy-efficient and high-performance products for webscale customers and smaller ones, too. [...]