Is the market for low end servers still viable ? The alternative to a low end server is the cloud server and it is much better option financially.
I think we would see a trend where companies would sell hosted infrastructure solutions ( e.g. MS Exchange, sharepoint etc. , Databases , firewall, etc.) and throw in a cluster of low end servers for free.
We're talking hardware here - whether you own it yourself, or it is "in the cloud", there is still a metal box somewhere behind it all, so there is still a market for those metal boxes.
Yes, but the biggest cloud providers build their own hardware. Google, Facebook, Backblaze, and more to come I'm sure. Intel and Micron and Foxconn will remain happy, but vendors of turnkey servers perhaps less so.
My point was that there may be no viable market for the metal; there may be a very small market of service providers who might might require made to order servers or may be even build their own like here http://www.opencompute.org/ . There won't be any reasonable margins left in the low end server market to sustain a hardware only company
The existing market of SMBs and enterprises for "the metal" is going away.
I think we would see a trend where companies would sell hosted infrastructure solutions ( e.g. MS Exchange, sharepoint etc. , Databases , firewall, etc.) and throw in a cluster of low end servers for free.