Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100. It's one thing to be left holding the bag when a SaaS startup goes under, but when you just spent millions on gear that is now completely unsupported... eek.
I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.
The fact that they're willing to absorb that risk is a strong signal they're solving a real problem. It's been a while since I've worked somewhere with on-prem hardware, but I remember long build-outs, unhelpful vendors: A RAID card firmware bug bricked our SAN. Our extremely expensive support contract gave us front-row seats to finger-pointing between the card manufacturer and Dell but ultimately no solution was provided to us. Our IT director, who was absolutely furious, basically had to twisted Dells arm to get them to send us replacement hardware. Whole thing was a giant fiasco.
This is the secret none of those existing vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc) are willing to tell you: They have very limited technical expertise on what they sell you and outside of some specialized troubleshooting they can do, they'll defer to their vendors. The understanding is that you've got the intellectual horsepower on staff to cope with their various shortcomings.
> Purchasing a ton of hardware from a startup seems extremely risky for a F100.
If you're working for a megacorp nothing tends to happen quickly, so there will be a slow roll-out over a multi-year period as old hardware gets phased out and new hardware is brought in for a refresh.
If there's a hiccup at any point they'll simply keep the previously purchased stuff running and start a new roll-out with another vendor next fiscal.
> I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.
1. They're just starting out. 2. Some of their customers want to be (or start-out initially) discreet:
> Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months.
In terms of physical hardware repairs or replacement, sure, that could be a risk when the supplier is an early-stage startup. Though I wonder if the open nature would also make it easier to create eg. third-party sleds
I doubt any F100 would go all-in on new vendor like Oxide for anything at first. I bet they could spend millions on a a few racks as a trial and have some groups work with it. A couple years down the line maybe they start expanding usage if they like it.
Of course that framing itself is bad - F100 companies aren't usually quite that monolithic. By the time they get that big there's a heterogeneous set of processes, equipment, systems, etc. Some parts of the company may use Oxide right away because they see it as a solution, and others may keep using the IBM mainframes, and other still will keep using racks/blade servers from Dell for eternity.
F100 waste so many millions already on projects that never see the light of day, why couldn't they throw money at Oxide and see if it works better than their AWS contract?
I bet the trick is to keep the perfect balance of high profile wins and and losses. You want to be defensible as an expert to the non-technical folks while obviously a fall guy to the technical ones I guess.
I think these guys aren’t that, though, they seem to be selling a real, cool product.
Yes, an industry where FUD and being SOTA is coveted, like cybersecurity can really get enterprise interest with the right connections. Few contracts of sorts to trade for logos on a slide deck and high profile references can get you further. Does your product actually do anything y is useful? Maybe, not yet, maybe never, but you were convincing enough and hey 1/10 startups fail.
I'd be curious to see what companies are interested, Oxide doesn't have any logos on their website which is a little odd given the space.