Businesses have spent the last decade playing catch-up with digital transformation. Cloud infrastructure has become the new trend, and companies have quickly adopted it. This shift has caused some businesses to increase their operating expenses to support their cloud architecture, leaving their capital expenditures-based legacy systems behind.
Supermicro allows companies to leverage a hybrid model of operating expenses cloud hosting with capital expenditures infrastructure. Businesses can get the best of both worlds with the security of owning and managing their on-premise infrastructure and the flexibility of the cloud. This hybrid approach can help businesses deploy at scale and store core business data should they need to down the road.
“We’re seeing customers come back around and say they’re going to run infrastructure on-premise to save a lot of money,” said Michael McNerney, Supermicro Vice President of Marketing and Network Security.
Supermicro provides companies with the IT infrastructure and hardware needed to build upon their digital transformation. Its white-label products come with customizability, so businesses can choose the features that align with their needs and goals going forward.
Supermicro CEO Charles Liang created the company in 1993. The company has accomplished many feats and now operates in more than 100 countries. IDC ranked it as the third-largest server systems supplier globally in 2018, while CRN listed it in the top 50 datacenter companies in 2020.
Michael said Supermicro works with customers to solve their specific pain points and configure custom builds that fit the customer’s approach to the cloud and on-premise infrastructure model.
“We can customize these different groups of products for a particular customer. We call it building blocks where we can approach a customer from the bottom up and say, what are your requirements,” said Michael.
Bringing the Customizability to OEM Models
Supermicro provides a range of features and products, including high-power motherboards, enterprise infrastructure, and server solutions. But what separates it from its competitors is its aptitude for customization since most traditional manufacturers that distribute white-label products don’t incorporate customizability into their offerings.
Michael said Supermicro takes a hybrid approach to OEM models that blends the traditional with the tier-one practices of newer companies such as Facebook and Amazon without the high prices. Facebook and Amazon follow the fully designed ODM trend but source their materials from other vendors.
At Supermicro, customers can purchase OEM products that fit their needs and save money. It helps companies that don’t have the necessary volumes to build their own designs to obtain customized products.
“What we’re seeing in this market is to provide that customizability or customization that you’d see with an ODM. So whatever the issue or piece needed, customers can find something to customize that design,” said Michael.
Michael said the Supermicro team allows customers to choose the features going into their infrastructure and add pieces they wouldn’t otherwise find at other traditional vendors. Supermicro has a building blocks system to help businesses develop a model for their SKU set while the IT company handles the rest of the designing process.
Supermicro products begin off-the-shelf but then go through the custom build process. Customers can communicate their requirements, and Supermicro will map it against their product list and design services. Companies can choose to incorporate a range of features, including rack integration services, memory, and various power limitations.
“And it’s been a pretty compelling model for people. Because all of a sudden, they get the design they want,” said Michael.
One of Supermicro’s biggest customers is Intel. It helped Intel create a chip design to run on 250,000 systems in six weeks. Supermicro was then able to use that similar design to drive their internal development process and sell it on the market.
“And then we saw a nice traction for the blade products across the EDA space with that,” said Michael.
Driving Efficiency with Infrastructure Optimization
Michael said companies should focus on building efficient infrastructure as cloud adoption increases. But they shouldn’t have to sacrifice on costs.
“You don’t want to be paying for extra memory or power. You want systems that are optimized for your workload,” said Michael.
Moving to the cloud has become a near-mandate as digital transformation takes over. Michael said the challenge is helping customers understand the value of differentiation and how IT infrastructure provides that.
Companies don’t have to outsource everything to cloud providers and rely solely on operating expenses. They can find the efficiency needed to support their data storage and other solutions in the on-premise infrastructure provided by Supermicro. Customers will also save money because they will pour fewer resources into their cloud architecture.
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