One of the secrets of nVidia's recent 17% QoQ improvement was the success of its "invisible" sales team, with representatives flying around the globe and selling the products directly to resellers and system integrators.
This is a common business practice, but what was interesting is that several people did a lot of air miles and sold massive amount of ION motherboards and complete systems. According to the sources we discussed the matter with, the problem that nVidia faced with ION was the same as the one faced by AMD a decade ago: AMD K7 e.g. Athlon was a superior product to Pentium III, but companies like ASUS and MSI refused to sell branded motherboards and sold products in plain white boxes.
Since nVidia is involved in multiple cross-license disputes with Intel, vendors weren't all too cheerful on buying Intel Atoms and soldering them onto ION motherboards, but nVidia found a way to counter that as well. In collaboration with Flextronics and PC Partner, the company manufactured motherboards and complete systems themselves, and now sells them under the guise from System Integrators and shopping mall giants. We learned of several deals in the EMEA region, but we cannot exclude that a similar practice is happening worldwide.
The ION system arrives at a SI's place almost complete, with only customizations are adding a hard drive, amount of system memory, silk-screening the SI's logo and putting a sticker with Microsoft Windows license key.
We learned of several deals in the EMEA region numbered in thousands and tens of thousands of units, meaning both customers and Intel can be happy: Intel will sell tens of thousands of Atoms at an increased margin, and end-users will get decent graphics hardware.
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