What’s New & What’s Next: David Sharp Opens Accelerate 2026

CalcuQuote's CEO, David Sharp, opens Accelerate 2026 by grounding the session in where the industry is heading. EMS faced real headwinds in 2025: shifting tariffs, regulatory change, and accelerated M&A. The companies that leaned into better tooling came out stronger.

Headshot David Sharp_250x250px
David Sharp
CEO, CalcuQuote

David sets the context for Accelerate by connecting market shifts with how EMS companies need to respond. His focus is on practical adoption of better tooling, scalable quoting processes, and building resilience in a volatile operating environment.

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Key Takeaways

How CalcuQuote grew through a challenging year of change

2025 reshaped the EMS landscape. Customers who invested in better tooling came out ahead.

  • Tariff shifts, regulatory change, and an active M&A cycle redrew the operating environment
  • CalcuQuote posted double-digit growth alongside customers who leaned into better tooling
  • New customers onboarded, existing partnerships expanded

 

Speed and scale, in concrete numbers

The performance gains over the last decade are not incremental.

  • Quote turn times have moved from weeks to days, then hours, then minutes, and in some cases seconds
  • BOM depth scaled from an original design ceiling of 12 sub-assembly levels to 750+ today, with 1,000 on the roadmap
  • BOM size grew from under 1,000 MPNs per assembly to 30,000, then 40,000, and is now processing 150,000 MPNs on a single assembly

From monolith to connected system

The 2025 rebuild moved CalcuQuote from a single monolithic application to a microservice architecture.

  • Teams can now upgrade individual pieces independently
  • Around 55 features ship per month
  • One recent customer went from contract signing to their first quote inside a week

A real partner ecosystem by design

CalcuQuote no longer believes in build-it-all-ourselves. Partners fill the gaps in compliance, sourcing intelligence, and adjacent workflows.

  • Partners present at Accelerate include Accuris, Banyan.eco, Bee Produced, Cableteque, camLine, Cetec ERP, Cofactr, and the Global Electronics Association
  • Integrations are deliberately first-class, not bolt-ons
  • The strategic shift is from a stack of point tools to a connected system

The feedback loop is the architectural priority

The 2026 design goal is to break the left-to-right flow of the quoting pipeline.

  • Customers face messy inputs, rising compliance demand (REACH, RoHS, PFAS, carbon), and silos between sourcing, engineering, and DFM
  • Information will no longer flow only left to right through the quoting pipeline
  • Downstream decisions feed back upstream to inform the next quote

The 2026 roadmap, in four pillars.

The year ahead is organised around four investment pillars, each one chosen because customers asked for it.

  • Deeper integrations with named partners
  • Additional data sources, including Accuris and Banyan
  • Advanced labor modelling
  • Intelligence expansion across compliance and AI-assisted decision-making