But it is notoriously ill-suited to high-tech industries that have to tailor each item to a customer's specific needs (as in a data-switching centre or air-traffic-control system) or in which it is crucial that thousands of interrelated components all work correctly together (as in a rocket vehicle).
The Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) community could bring another shift as start-ups begin invading this space, switching the emphasis to managing personal data assets on behalf of users.
It finally released a long-anticipated new switching technology called QFabric that can reduce the number of switches a data center needs by between 50% and 80%.