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The ‘whitebox’ supplier has two advantages – performance and cost – although the advantage of each has been diminishing in recent years. Local suppliers don’t carry any research and development overhead or the large support infrastructure of the international companies and this keeps their costs down. And by comparison they buy components (like processors) in tiny shipments allowing them to start shipping the fastest components as soon as they are available.

This last advantage is actually a disadvantage on a site of any size. There is far greater benefit in being able to open any computer at a site and be sure of the components inside than there is having a few faster computers at the expense of uncertainty.

The price gap has narrowed as well.

For HP longer production runs for each model help immensely with troubleshooting issues. For an HP server running Windows 2003 the large installed base from their production runs (many thousands) and extensive engineering staff (many thousands again) means that HP are aware of almost all the compatibility issues. Local vendors can only speculate at best. They can often have less than 100 units of your server in the field and have no engineering resource to collate in the field data from even these small numbers.

The hardware game is a high capital game with tight margins. For companies with thin balance sheets (i.e. New Zealand companies) it is difficult to survive and there has been a high attrition rate. Local companies maintain far less warranty stock both because of cost and the huge variation in componentry in their installed base.

For these reason local assemblers tend to do well with home users, small business and the education sector where cost demands diminish the risks. For all other business the choices are HP, IBM Dell, Acer, Toshiba and other billion dollar international megaliths.