J.R. Rivers is one of the Google engineers who secretly designed a new breed of networking hardware for the data centers underpinning the company’s massively popular search engine and the rest of its web services. Rather than buy from traditional networking vendors such as Cisco and Juniper, Google worked in tandem with manufacturers in China and Taiwan to acquire networking gear on the cheap, and now, Rivers is helping the rest of the big web players — and other companies — do much the same thing. It’s the beginning of a major in the hardware market, where more and more companies are cutting out middlemen such as Cisco, HP, and Dell.
