Customers are willing to opt for newer technologies

Claiming to be a pioneer in the data center market, APC made innovations

to designing, building and operating these facilities. Blumanis talks about the

experience so far

How are you trying to take APC UPS products and reposition them from

add-on peripherals to core components of a data center solution?



In the past five years, we have seen that APC, which was perceived as a UPS

company, is now looked as a data center provider. When we entered the data

center market, we came out with a new way to design, build and operate data

centers. Traditional data centers were built in the same way for over 60 years

without any innovation. They would have big UPS and primitive cooling for rooms.

We changed that by building solutions specific to data centers. So instead of

room cooling, we have deep row cooling. We created management tools to help

customers manage the heat and cooling of their data centers.

Now customers themselves are willing to opt for newer technologies which will

give them better RoI. This is because as they bought new blade servers and

storage racks, and tried to put them into the data centers, the latter started

breaking down. We are into the sixth generation of products, while our

competition is still on their first or second generation products.

How has the Schneider acquisition affected APC?



Schneider Electric acquired us some months ago which has benefited our data

center offering better as we have a more comprehensive solution suite to provide

to a single customer.

How are you getting your channel partners to enter into a dialogue with

their customers on green technology?



There are two sides to the green concept. The first is the evangelism that

needs to be done by a vendor from a top down approach. The second is the self

awareness that takes place from a bottoms up approach.

This is why we are seeing large corporations opting for virtualization, and

coming to us querying about the technologies that they can deploy in the next

data centers that they are setting up. And as they opt for these new

technologies they are also realizing the need for efficient heat and cooling

management.

Most CIOs consider power and cooling as penumbra of the IT

infrastructure's nucleus. What is your say?



We are now getting CIOs to understand that they should not make IT purchase

decisions based on the technology or cost alone. They need to see the impact it

has on the power and cooling then and look at a holistic picture.

VINITA BHATIA



vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in