Hewlett-Packard and Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn announced a joint venture to build a line of low-cost, “cloud-optimized” servers aimed at service providers.
The two companies aim to carve out a piece of the market encompassing service providers that are rushing to expand their cloud architecture implementations as well as businesses pursuing the in the hosting-as-a-service models.
The non-equity joint venture, in the form of a strategic commercial agreement, will take effect on May 1. Pricing details on the products will be announced at a later date.
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The partnership will bring together Foxconn’s supply chain expertise and HP server technology. Foxconn is a multinational electronics contract manufacturer best known for turning out products including BlackBerry handsets, Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod as well as Kindle tablets, Xbox, Playstation and Wii game consoles.
The new line of servers will complement HP’s existing ProLiant server portfolio which includes the “hyperscale” class Moonshot server.
“This partnership reflects business model innovation in our server business, where the high-volume design and manufacturing expertise of Foxconn, combined with the compute and service leadership of HP, will enable us to deliver a game changing offering in infrastructure economic,” said Meg Whitman, chief executive officer of HP, in a statement.
The servers will be designed to meet the compute requirement of “the world’s largest service providers” to deliver, low cost of ownership, scale and service and support. The move towards cloud-based delivery models such as infrastructure as a service is expected to bolster 15 to 20 per cent growth in servers used for hosting between 2013 and 2018, according to latest estimates by analyst group IDC.
“Cloud computing is radically changing the entire supply chain for the server market as customers place new demands on the breath of design capability, value-oriented solutions and large-scale and global manufacturing capabilities,” said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of Foxconn.