Who's going to sell hardware if not for the networking giants though? While hardware may be a declining business in terms of revenue it doesn't mean that there's no business either. After all, the big cloud providers will all have to source hardware from someone even if everyone goes whole hog into the OCP ecosystem with cheap, large scale vendors based primarily in low cost of business regions. Who's better equipped to handle economies of scale better than large companies in our world? Did I miss something about manufacturing trends being disrupted in the past 15 years?

If anything, these vendors would want some say on the SDN systems so that their hardware can better integrate with them and offer more compelling value than their competitors.

Network switches are increasingly being based on silicon from companies like broadcom with their Trident and Tomahawk line (what Facebook's six pack use), Intel's Fulcrum chips, Mellanox, or Cavium's Xpliant chips.

An ODM vendor like Quanta makes the equivalent of a "motherboard" for those, and sticks it in a box.

Then you can get software from a vendor like Cumulus which has all the SDN goodness.

Vendors like Cisco, Juniper, or Arista sold all of those as one big product. Whitebox switching is about breaking those up so you can buy them more like you buy your servers.

The idea is to buy the hardware from ODMs like Quanta, Accton, Celestica, Foxconn, etc. They already manufacture all name-brand IT equipment anyway.

> Who's going to sell hardware if not for the networking giants though?

AWS, GCP and Azure will sell you hardware, with a bunch of other services on top.

That makes sense. Is this a case of trading hardware dollars for SDN cents or does it bridge the gap? I have no idea about the economics of this space.