The first is a Bloomberg piece titled "Dell Loses Orders as Facebook Do-It-Yourself Servers Gain." Bloomberg notes that large cloud providers are designing their own servers and having them manufactured to order. The traditional server suppliers like HP and Dell (while the headline read "Dell," it was clear from the article that this phenomenon applies to all of the major server vendors) are faced with an unpleasant dilemma: manufacture these custom designs, but accept lower margins, or proffer higher-margin standard designs and lose orders.

The implication of the article was clear. The large cloud market is cost-focused and applies pressure on vendors to accept less profit in return for volume. Astonishingly, according to Gartner analyst Jeffrey Hewitt, quoted in the article, this type of server accounts for 20 percent of the server market (the article wasn't clear if this is 20 percent of shipments or revenue). From this stat, it's clear that this is a significant part of the market; one can expect that it will come to represent an even higher proportion of the overall market, increasing the margin compression for server vendors.

Brocade, a network equipment manufacturer, aimed at cloud computing environments. Customers can acquire network equipment on a subscription basis: "Customers can subscribe for additional capacity to meet peaks and then step down capacity as those peaks diminish."