Insights from the Channel: CCIntegration

[MattQuirk]

Keith Wood

CCIntegration was established in 1985 in Plano, TX, and is the fastest-growing company in the US OEM integration space. Curious about the factors behind its success, we spoke to Keith Wood, CCI’s Vice President of Sales & Marketing. Keith shed light on the areas of OEM opportunity, CCI’s biggest value-add services, and what he sees as the future of CCI’s strategic partnership with HPE OEM Solutions. 

Hi Keith. Can you tell us about your role at CCIntegration?

My role is Vice President of Sales & Marketing, which I have held for the past 13 years. In addition, I have been in the OEM integration industry for 35 years. My responsibility is to acquire new OEM/ISV accounts that need hardware to deploy their software, and I have a team of salespeople working to achieve this. Most of our business comes from North America, with a third coming from Europe and Asia.

CCI is the fastest-growing OEM integration company in the US in the last five years. What do you think is the biggest driver(s) behind that?

First of all, we can help our customers be future-ready. For example, when hardware generations change, we are able to handle these updates as a service, including all changes to imaging, so it is one less thing for our customers to worry about.

Secondly, we have the most senior management executive team in the industry. Each person comes with 20+ years of experience in OEM outsourced manufacturing. As a result, we have a bigger network of potential clients than our competitors.

Finally, CCI is woman-owned, and this is opening opportunities with companies that are looking for diversification in their supply chain.

HPE recently announced its vision for bringing AI to enterprise at its HPE Discover event. How do you foresee this impacting what CCI’s OEM customers ask for going forward?

We are seeing a lot of opportunity at the edge with AI inferencing, so we expect demand for this to ramp up in the coming year. In addition, our purpose-built, full rack integration business is really taking off. Data centers for AI are buying full technology racks from us; to keep up with this demand, we have built a new facility that is dedicated to this aspect of our business.

You work in a dynamic and constantly evolving industry. How does CCI stay ahead of emerging industry trends? 

CCI is one of the few integration companies that have multiple facilities – we currently have two US factories and one in Europe. This helps us assure scale and business continuity, which many of our customers are looking for. We also ensure that all our factories follow the exact same processes.

We are always looking to provide new services to our customers. For example, we are preparing to launch a software development service, which none of our competitors are doing. This means that our customers will be able to outsource their software development to us from August 2024. We will be able to produce driver development for custom cards, handle VMware transition to other virtualization platforms, and port customers from Nvidia to another GPU vendor.

If a new service is mentioned among our client base, we are quick to see if it is something we can offer in-house. If this is feasible, we can launch it within a few months. Our ethos is to see our customers as unique and we do our utmost to accommodate their different needs.

What's an example of a value-add that sets CCIntegration apart? 

We have a high level of execution. For example, our design to production cycle is the fastest in the industry. This is coupled with a back-end logistics service that allows CCI to handle the delivery of our clients’ products on a global level.

We also pride ourselves on the quality of our output. Quality lies at the heart of our processes, as reflected by our robust quality control measures that scrutinize every aspect of production, from the procurement of raw materials to the final product assembly.

Lastly, tell us a little about CCI's partnership with HPE OEM Solutions. What does the future hold?

We love HPE’s focus on technology and its unique offerings. For example, a 5-year standard warranty is built into its product pricing and it even offers encryption at the RAID controller level.

We hope to have an even closer and more strategic partnership going forward, especially in the government sector. Clients in this sector require encryption services and the most secure appliances. We believe that a strong partnership between CCI and HPE can help us capture this customer base.

Thanks for being here today, Keith. To find out more about CCIntegration’s work and services, please visit its website.