Thinking Outside the Box

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Even the name is boring: white box. Plain. Vanilla. Uniform. Dull. But today’s white-box dealers—systems builders, as they like to be known—are anything but a staid and stoic bunch. The gear they’re turning out is appealing to a vast array of end users, from those seeking cutting-edge technology to those in vertical markets such as point-of-sale (POS) and multimedia management.

The white box: It’s not just for word processing anymore.

“With us, anything that you can possibly buy is available and we can build it,” says Ed Frowley, president of Fireball PC in West Granby, Conn. “And when we’re done, we’re here close by, and the customer can call us for support.”

Analyst firms have been predicting a slowdown this year in desktop sales, with users opting for laptops or waiting for better technology. Thus far, they appear to be right. U.S. PC sales are up just 5.3 percent, according to IDC. With laptops driving much of that modest growth, the pressure is on purveyors of desktops to push the devices beyond their normal range of use.

Dave Zhan, president of Future Technology International (FTI), a systems builder in Great Neck, N.Y., says he still sees most demand for traditional workstations performing traditional roles such as word processing. But innovative uses for the increasingly commoditized white-box desktop are growing, he adds.

“We do a lot of POS devices,” Zhan says. “And one hotspot for sure is in DVRs. People use them for security and monitoring. You can take a machine for $400, hook it up with a camera and, using the Internet, monitor what’s going on from anywhere. That’s really hot right now.”

Zhan said FTI is currently involved in a significant project with a funeral home in which DVR-capable white boxes are a big part of the rollout.

Frowley says he knows well the necessity of building customized machines and staying on top of the latest white-box trends.

“It’s impossible to compete with Dell or Gateway on the box alone,” Frowley says. “People are going to come to us to get very specific things...to get exactly what they want.”

And what customers want increasingly these days is a box that can sit at the heart of their digital home, Frowley says. Fireball is doing a growing amount of its business supplying what he calls the home server—high-performance gaming servers, television tuners, digital recorders and touch-screen kiosk controllers, among the applications.

In the business world, Frowley says computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems are an important and developing market. Fireball delivered 12 souped-up CAD machines in a single engagement last month, each complete with maxed-out memory and high-end video cards.

“We’re seeing a lot of work in this area,” Frowley says. “3D CAD/CAM, modeling and animation are hot areas.”

NEXT: What it comes down to for VARs.