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

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.