MBX Plans 2015 Plant Upgrades, New Hires for Server Appliance Business

LIBERTYVILLE, Ill., Feb. 26, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- MBX Systems today announced a series of 2015 plant, personnel and services expansion plans to support its rapidly growing OEM server appliance contract manufacturing business. The initiatives follow a strong 2014 performance that included record revenues and unit volume, a new San Jose engineering and sales office servicing West Coast customers, and an OEM partnership with HP that provides a new Tier One base hardware option along with global certification, warranty and technical support for international customers who sell their products globally.

Serving software vendors and service providers who deliver their applications pre-loaded on optimized hardware systems, MBX is now preparing for its next phase of growth with a planned 30% increase in its workforce as well as new plant upgrades and provisioning models to be rolled out this year. The company is planning:

• Increased build capacity for larger orders with the addition of six new "Super Cell" work areas at its primary Chicago-area facility that will enable simultaneous configuration and testing of up to 640 systems, with monthly capacity exceeding 25,000 units per shift per month.
• A new Hardware as a Service (HaaS) option enabling customers to align their traditional Software as a Service (SaaS) business model with an on-premise hardware appliance without the need for heavy upfront capital expenditures by end users.
• Full manufacturing in The Netherlands for customers with global needs. The company already stocks finished systems in countries throughout North and South America, Europe and APAC. Now it is expanding into overseas manufacturing to expedite turnaround time for systems destined for European customers.

"These new services on our roadmap are a direct result of a 20-year growth trajectory reflecting our 100% appliance focus as well as our ability to provide high-touch services to meet disparate customer needs," said Jill Bellak, MBX President and Chief Operating Officer. "Our 2014 performance marked the culmination of two decades of fine-tuning both manufacturing and business processes."

Much of MBX's growth during 2014 came from key vertical markets including cloud/data center, storage and network security, which delivered 28%, 43% and 53% revenue increases during the 12-month period, respectively. Overall achievements included a 26% increase in the number of systems built, a 37% increase in overall revenues, and new quality benchmarks included 97% customer satisfaction, 94% customer retention and 99% defect-free systems.

The new San Jose office – designed to help speed time to market for West Coast customers by enabling in-person engineering discussions and evaluations of different hardware configuration options – also began to yield results. Engineering and testing services provided by locally based MBX staff has given customers faster hands-on access to new technologies from key partners including HP, Supermicro, Seagate and Intel. Customers visiting the lab gain one-on-one time with engineers to review compatibility, power consumption, environmental and image revision testing as well as performance evaluations of platform designs under consideration.

A video ingesting and transcoding customer based in Silicon Valley, for example, achieved a 269% performance improvement of their existing appliance-based solution by working with the MBX San Jose engineering team to optimize the system. MBX engineers made adjustments ranging from switching to solid state drives (SSDs) to eliminate disk bottlenecks, to fine-tuning CPU utilization, power management in the BIOS, hyper threading and operating system settings to maximize the performance threshold.

More information about MBX services is available at http://www.mbx.com/what-we-do/  

About MBX Systems
MBX Systems is a leading designer and manufacturer of application-optimized server appliances and cloud-ready solutions for ISVs and service providers worldwide. MBX delivers turnkey hardware systems that are 100% customized to the customer's specifications by in-house platform engineers, while also offering value-added services such as branding, software imaging, regulatory/compliance, global logistics and warranty support to relieve customers of all hardware responsibilities. That unusual range of services, along with award-winning quality, innovation and customer service, has attracted customers in more than 40 vertical industries in the past two decades. For more information, visit www.mbx.com.

SOURCE MBX Systems

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