Paul,
Re:"Intel's main customers are Compaq, Dell, IBM, HP, Gateway, etc. and their (Intel's) distributors.
How does a bank of server farms for Web Commerce hosting compete with these companies?"
I think we all view the server market as the growth engine in the CPU and computer market in general driven by the net.
Folks like IBM,CPQ,HP,Dell etc sell severs into IT departments that then basically set up an e-commerce site and operation. An alternative to doing all this inhouse is the web=hosting data center as offered by many companies, who also are customers of IBM,HP,CPQ etc.
Now Intel will be offering to by-pass this whole operation by putting a huge data-center in place. Clearly this should be more efficent/reliable (at least for small to medium) sized business than doing it themselves.
It would be my guess that Intel will end up buying thousands of these servers from a low cost integrator as opposed to an IBM,HP,CPQ etc. So these guys lose the hardware revenue. But in addition they lose the service revenue which is what is driving their growth/margins at folks like IBM etc.
I am NOT saying its a dumb move.
Just that by itself it is questionable and there is probably a lot more to it than just offering a large server farm.
Regards,
Kash Johal. |
