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Marginally related but I've always wanted to discuss this- I met a guy whose small business (he claims) is purchasing networking equipment from the same Chinese

Marginally related but I've always wanted to discuss this- I met a guy whose small business (he claims) is purchasing networking equipment from the same Chinese factories that manufacture Cisco/other networking company products. He told me that he obviously just purchases in much smaller amounts, slaps his brand on it, and then has a small number of salespeople sell them throughout the US (he claimed to specialize in school districts and universities). He said his prices were lower than Cisco's (or other companies) because he has much less overhead. I think he was born in China, so he may have an in with whoever these factories are, possibly via personal connection. I can't verify some of his story, but he does legitimately run a small, closely held business selling networking gear. And he is clearly wealthy. Would be sort of a cool business hack if true!

ethbr0 4y ago
If "business hack" = stealing someone else's designs, I've got a lot of profitable opportunities for you...
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Zuck is doing just fine.
duxup 4y ago
The buyers must know. The quirks / bugs of various networking companies equipment is well known. I wonder if the buyers are possibly defrauding their employers…
- newsclues 4y ago
  Of course they are.
rconti 4y ago
He's probably not just selling stolen hardware designs, he's probably also selling illegally copied software!
- hash872 4y ago
  Because I'm completely naive, it literally did not occur to me that this was illegal
bastawhiz 4y ago
> because he has much less overhead. Well, when you're selling hardware that you can't support because it's pirated or fake, you do tend to have less overhead.
zamadatix 4y ago
Most network vendors have at least some quantity (usually a significant portion of their volume, some completely) of their hardware sourced from Broadcom, Qualcomm, and/or Mellanox (now Nvidia) they slap in their physical chassis. There are a few exceptions (Intel has Tofino, Cisco/Juniper/Aurba design some products or pieces of products in house, and a lot of smaller Fortinet Firewalls are their custom NPU/SPUs without merchant silicon in front) but overall common gear typically includes a common base. Stealing a full chassis design and sticking your logo on it would be outright wrong but just ordering the main components to be assembled in a factory like the other network vendors isn't a hack it's just how that business is done. Of course the hardware isn't usually where differentiation comes from, especially for school and university type deployments, and the default software e.g. Broadcom will provide is straight dogshit. Going back to the above having an unauthorized copy of a box and selling unauthorized copies of the 3rd party software would be extremely wrong and illegal but just running with the default software or loading whitebox software and selling services for it is the standard way of doing things (unless you're a Juniper/Cisco/Aruba/Extreme/Fortinet sized company in which case you might make your own NOS). Sometimes vendors will be willing to go into custom logo agreements directly. E.g. you are an ISP and use Nokia boxes in your deployment but want them to have your ISP's logo on the box and software page instead of Nokia's, but generally you don't get an extremely wide margin on this type of agreement, especially if it includes selling to 3rd parties, you get more like a standard VAR level discount. There are also "whitebox" vendors that handle the "get the merchant silicon into a complete hardware solution" portion but don't cover the "and sell it with network software or support" half, leaving that to standard VARs. Long story short the situation was either poorly explained and the business functions more as a typical network VAR (which is definitely a place where you can make good money) or it was actually explained well but isn't a "business hack" just unethical and illegal.
the_biot 4y ago
I can assure you that's entirely plausible. There are many big vendors like this, with a rather smaller set of vendors that sell switch chips for them. High end network switches are effectively a commodity now, and often are not much more than a board built around a single chip/chipset, which does everything. As for software, there are many vendors and open source projects that make complete distributions for these generic switches/chipsets. One way to get an idea of the sheer number of devices in play here is to look at the hardware supported by ONIE, a small Linux distribution that is a de facto standard bootloader for these. Can't find a proper HCL for ONIE, but have a look at the source: https://github.com/opencomputeproject/onie/tree/master/machine https://github.com/opencomputeproject/onie/tree/master/machi... The number of models is staggering. So what your friend does is clever as a business, but not necessarily even high tech or technically hard, nor does it need special connections. It's just a huge market, there for anyone to build a reseller business around.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > High end network switches are effectively a commodity now, and often are not much more than a board built around a single chip/chipset, which does everything. Is this really the case? I worked on the Cat6k in the late 2000's, and it was definitely not a single chipset. Maybe it's different when you get to switches that can support 300+ ports.
  - the_biot 4y ago
    Cisco may have been slow to take advantage of the commoditization of these switch chips, for obvious reasons: it was in large part their market that was being commoditized. I would argue this is even more pronounced on the lower end now, with I think mostly Marvell and Realtek chips.
- bitcoinmoney 4y ago
  Would you know how one breaks into this business? Are there biddings you can just show up and submit your bid? What if you don’t have experience doing sales?
analog31 4y ago
Telling the customers this story would be a cheap way of piggybacking off the Cisco brand.
cscurmudgeon 4y ago
> Would be sort of a cool business hack if true! Also illegal if selling stolen designs and software if true!

ethbr0 4y ago

If "business hack" = stealing someone else's designs, I've got a lot of profitable opportunities for you...

KyeRussell 4y ago
Zuck is doing just fine.

duxup 4y ago

The buyers must know. The quirks / bugs of various networking companies equipment is well known. I wonder if the buyers are possibly defrauding their employers…

newsclues 4y ago
Of course they are.

rconti 4y ago

He's probably not just selling stolen hardware designs, he's probably also selling illegally copied software!

hash872 4y ago
Because I'm completely naive, it literally did not occur to me that this was illegal

bastawhiz 4y ago

> because he has much less overhead. Well, when you're selling hardware that you can't support because it's pirated or fake, you do tend to have less overhead.

zamadatix 4y ago

Most network vendors have at least some quantity (usually a significant portion of their volume, some completely) of their hardware sourced from Broadcom, Qualcomm, and/or Mellanox (now Nvidia) they slap in their physical chassis. There are a few exceptions (Intel has Tofino, Cisco/Juniper/Aurba design some products or pieces of products in house, and a lot of smaller Fortinet Firewalls are their custom NPU/SPUs without merchant silicon in front) but overall common gear typically includes a common base. Stealing a full chassis design and sticking your logo on it would be outright wrong but just ordering the main components to be assembled in a factory like the other network vendors isn't a hack it's just how that business is done. Of course the hardware isn't usually where differentiation comes from, especially for school and university type deployments, and the default software e.g. Broadcom will provide is straight dogshit. Going back to the above having an unauthorized copy of a box and selling unauthorized copies of the 3rd party software would be extremely wrong and illegal but just running with the default software or loading whitebox software and selling services for it is the standard way of doing things (unless you're a Juniper/Cisco/Aruba/Extreme/Fortinet sized company in which case you might make your own NOS). Sometimes vendors will be willing to go into custom logo agreements directly. E.g. you are an ISP and use Nokia boxes in your deployment but want them to have your ISP's logo on the box and software page instead of Nokia's, but generally you don't get an extremely wide margin on this type of agreement, especially if it includes selling to 3rd parties, you get more like a standard VAR level discount. There are also "whitebox" vendors that handle the "get the merchant silicon into a complete hardware solution" portion but don't cover the "and sell it with network software or support" half, leaving that to standard VARs. Long story short the situation was either poorly explained and the business functions more as a typical network VAR (which is definitely a place where you can make good money) or it was actually explained well but isn't a "business hack" just unethical and illegal.

the_biot 4y ago

I can assure you that's entirely plausible. There are many big vendors like this, with a rather smaller set of vendors that sell switch chips for them. High end network switches are effectively a commodity now, and often are not much more than a board built around a single chip/chipset, which does everything. As for software, there are many vendors and open source projects that make complete distributions for these generic switches/chipsets. One way to get an idea of the sheer number of devices in play here is to look at the hardware supported by ONIE, a small Linux distribution that is a de facto standard bootloader for these. Can't find a proper HCL for ONIE, but have a look at the source: https://github.com/opencomputeproject/onie/tree/master/machine https://github.com/opencomputeproject/onie/tree/master/machi... The number of models is staggering. So what your friend does is clever as a business, but not necessarily even high tech or technically hard, nor does it need special connections. It's just a huge market, there for anyone to build a reseller business around.

dehrmann 4y ago
> High end network switches are effectively a commodity now, and often are not much more than a board built around a single chip/chipset, which does everything. Is this really the case? I worked on the Cat6k in the late 2000's, and it was definitely not a single chipset. Maybe it's different when you get to switches that can support 300+ ports.
- the_biot 4y ago
  Cisco may have been slow to take advantage of the commoditization of these switch chips, for obvious reasons: it was in large part their market that was being commoditized. I would argue this is even more pronounced on the lower end now, with I think mostly Marvell and Realtek chips.
bitcoinmoney 4y ago
Would you know how one breaks into this business? Are there biddings you can just show up and submit your bid? What if you don’t have experience doing sales?

analog31 4y ago

Telling the customers this story would be a cheap way of piggybacking off the Cisco brand.

cscurmudgeon 4y ago

> Would be sort of a cool business hack if true! Also illegal if selling stolen designs and software if true!