Quanta was mostly known as an ODM, the guys who the OEMs went to make their hardware. But, Quanta has made the move to be in the direct sales business and guess what they are moving very fast.

Compaq was the beginning of the some of the first dual processor, dual hard drive, x86 based servers. In the beginning it was Compaq, HP and IBM who had the knowledge to build servers. Over time to reduce costs the manufacturing was move to Asia and eventually the engineering was moved to Asia, leaving the OEMs to have the customer relationship. In the shift to the bigger data center players. Remember 5 years ago how small Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple's data centers were? Now they are the dominant players and there has been a shift to the economies of scale with 10,000s of servers a small yearly order. The big guys buy 100,000s of servers a year.

This shift benefits a player like Quanta.

GigaOm has an article on Quanta.

How an unknown Taiwanese server maker is eating the big guys’ lunch

by Jordan Novet

MAR. 16, 2013 - 1:30 PM PDT

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SUMMARY:
In the server business, Taiwanese hardware company Quanta has shifted from an original-design manufacturer to much more of a direct seller. It wants to extend the trend and sell other products, too.

Here is the part that caught my eye.

Back then, Quanta didn’t sell servers directly to customers, it only built them for traditional server vendors who then put their name on them and sold them to customers. Fast forward a few years, and a majority of Quanta’s server revenue stems from direct deals — 65 percent in 2012, and a forecasted 85 percent this year.

Quanta is expanding the cloud hub of development in Seattle.

Next month, the company will open an office in Seattle in order to be closer to customers. Yang said Quanta has several customers in the area, although he declined to name them. Microsoft, which is building huge data center capacity for Windows Azure and its Live offerings, is a short drive from Seattle, in Redmond, Wash., and Seattle is much closer to Quincy, Wash., a hotbed of data centers, than the Fremont office. Quanta will add more U.S. offices for sales and service this year, Yang said.