Exclusive Interview : Dhiren Pandya, Director- Vertiv

In an exclusive interaction with DQ Channels, Dhiren Pandya, Director, Business Development (Cloud & Colo Segment) Vertiv has talked about Vertiv’s product portfolio, datacentre trends and future plans for 2019.

Describe Vertiv's current product portfolio.

At Vertiv, we aim to be ‘Architects of Continuity’ that collaborate with organizations and customers to envision and build future-ready infrastructures. This signifies that we are focused on keeping customers’ businesses always up and running. We ensure that their digital infrastructure runs continuously and evolves as the business changes. Our objective is to deliver critical infrastructure technologies and customized solutions, to meet precise business requirements and needs.

We leverage our portfolio of hardware, software, analytics, and services, to ensure our customers’ vital applications run continuously, perform optimally, and scale with business needs. Our portfolio ranges from UPS systems that are suited from a smaller sized set-up to the largest of data centers, our thermal management portfolio for the customer’s smallest and precise cooling needs to the most complicated data center cooling requirements, and smart solutions that combine our offerings in a single package and are technologically advanced data centers in themselves. Our infrastructure monitoring, intelligent controls and centralized management systems work simultaneously to enhance equipment availability, application, and efficiency.

IT Management Systems that monitor, control and maintain multiple data centers and solutions that cater to the telecom and industrial DC power requirements further ensure that we always support mission-critical applications.

How Increased adoption of IoT and cloud services has created opportunities for colocation providers in India?

The traditional model of a data center is being overtaken by the colocation model at a growing rate and the emergence of IoT has led to increasing opportunities for colocation facility owners. It is predicted that consolidation of data centers will overtake the data center market, leading to a substantial growth of the colocation market. One of the effects of this consolidation has been the convergence of cloud and colocation. Cloud providers are increasingly using colocation to expand their reach while colocation companies are adopting cloud services to improve their competitive position.

With the explosive growth in data and digital applications, combined with increased adoption of cloud services, India’s cloud and colocation market demand has increased significantly and the market has become more dynamic and sophisticated.

The adoption of cloud-based services is growing significantly, with a growing demand for IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS among enterprise customers in India adopting public and private cloud services.

With formidable support from the government for IoT and digitization initiatives, combined with an influx of global colocation providers and IT decision makers pursuing to move data from on-premises to colocation data centers, India represents a significant opportunity for colocation providers, predominantly those that have added cloud services.

At Vertiv, we are committed to helping colo and cloud providers and the enterprises they serve capitalize on these opportunities.

Highlight the Cloud capabilities and IoT gateways for data centres for Vertiv.

At Vertiv, we have a host of initiatives that are being implemented as well as more in the pipeline, that will help us cater to the cloud computing boom and enable IoT assisted data center infrastructure. The Vertiv cloud offering makes use of associated knowledge from decades of data center projects, in order to deliver real-time analysis, to simplify and streamline data center processes and development.

Part of the Vertiv cloud offering is an Internet of Things (IoT) gateway that delivers additional security with simple installation to streamline data center connectivity. The Vertiv™ RDU301 gateway comes from a family of monitoring and control products that integrates with building management systems to ensure that any data passed to the Vertiv cloud from the customer site is done securely using minimum bandwidth.

Together, with the Vertiv Intelligence app and portal, the Vertiv gateway enables remote visibility, collection, and analysis of critical infrastructure data. With Vertiv cloud, that is supplemented by the constant inflow of real-time data, operators will be able to make decisions based on data-based insight and best practices from across the industry. Along with the Vertiv Intelligence app and portal, the Vertiv gateway enables remote visibility, collection, and analysis of critical infrastructure data.

What drives us forward, is the fact that cloud computing is now slowly moving towards the edge. This will need reliable passive infrastructure, considering the ever-increasing consumer demands. We are driven towards colocation set-ups that are being constantly deployed with a cloud computing architecture in the Indian market, which will soon become the biggest hub for colocation data centers.

What are the key datacentre trends for 2019?

There are several challenges plaguing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities, given the emergence of digital technologies like IoT, HCI, big data, 5G and more. We anticipate self-sufficient, self-healing edge in service of IoT, 5G and ‘datacenter-as-a-service’ to be crucial going forward.

The edge of the network continues to be the focal point of innovation in the data center space, with a concentration on increased intelligence designed to simplify operations, enable remote management and service, and bridge the widening skills gap. We perceive these trends to dominate the space - Simplifying the Edge, Workforce Revolution, Smarter, More Efficient UPS Systems, Pursuing Normalization and High-Power Processors and Advanced Cooling.

Additionally, modular data centers are prefabricated, preskinned, factory-tested are popular as there aren’t enough resources for installation. Data center standardization helps manage multiple deployments, on our equipment or somebody else’s. Deploying open platforms that allow monitoring-management of multiple devices are some of the trends we anticipate.

What is the Vertiv’s future roadmap?

We are prepared for the latest advancements in data center technology and have streamlined our operations, offerings and strategies to be more engaged with customers through reduced response times, faster development of new solutions and improved services to offer. In terms of product innovation, we look to innovate faster, as we are growing quicker than anticipated. We aspire to be the preferred brand when it comes to vital applications, critical technologies, and data centers. Our goal is to create a distinctive position for ourselves in the customers’ mind, so they identify with our brand attributes and offerings that set us apart from competition.

Given our growing focus on customer experience, our aim is to provide better end-to-end delivery, supply chain and customer delivery. Through our people management initiatives, development is a focus as there is a shortage of data center knowledge among new entrants and we are trying to help train and bring in more people.

Through our channel focus initiatives, we continue to be more hyper-focussed and aggressive on the channel, and the edge throughout this year. With the roll out of the Vertiv Xpress Partner Drive this year, a huge impact has been witnessed within the first three months. We are striving to better ourselves year after year to become a ‘player with a difference’ in the space we operate in.