With the introduction of virtualization, cloud and now the Internet of Things, the business of power is not only a growth sector but also a strategic play to be considered in the overall purchase of IT.
In better understanding this evolution, CDN is speaking with Eaton’s Hervé Tardy, the VP and GM of Distributed Power Quality for the Americas and Jodi Bonham, IT Channel Manager who also sits on the Board of Directors for the newly formed Canadian Channel Chiefs Council (C4).
For those who are not currently paying attention to its power needs, Eaton sells power solutions like UPS and PDU designed to be rack-mounted in an IT enclosure.
Its strategy is what Hervé states as a “quest to invest” mentality surrounding itself with great partners, VARS and resellers totalling over 500 in Canada for just their IT side of the business. Eaton is 4Xs larger in its electrical business. Canada makes up four per cent of its global revenue and it currently holds a 10 per cent market share position in this country. Eaton’s largest competitor is Schneider Electric, formerly APC.
Hervé stated unlike the U.S., Canada tends to be more of a mid-size play than the large enterprise business found in the U.S. Eaton is well positioned to accommodate the large data centres with both its UPS and PDU offerings. However, it’s clear with the emergence of giants such as Amazon, Google and Apple that the large UPS portion of sales is on a decline. What was in the past a $20 million UPS sale in the U.S. for a large enterprise data centre is a mere shadow at $2 million for these new, hyper-scale data centres which rely on software redundancy.
Eaton’s sweet spot sectors for Canada cover Education, Healthcare and the Municipal government spaces. There is growth in these areas, according to Bonham and Tardy because of the movement to cloud requiring increased bandwidth that is generating refresh cycles for networking gear.
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In marketing speak, Eaton is ‘The Virtualization Expert.” With such a toolset a company can do it all off the same VMware vCenter dashboard. This plug-in solution now costs $500 instead of a complete power management system of $30,000. That is true innovation at play. And speaking about quality the power game must have the right validation from the right players. In Eaton’s case its technology has been validated by the likes of EMC, Cisco, NetApp as well as having a very strategic relationship with its main partner, VMware.
When looking at power solutions Eaton’s Bonham shared some important examples of types of installed bases as well as :
Public and Catholic School Boards across Canada
- With Microsoft’s XP support retiring, several school boards have needed to replace their Desktops. With this type of change, a refresh of the UPS protecting the desktop is usually installed at the same time. Pricing, product availability and total cost of ownership (including battery replacements) over the life cycle of the UPS solution are taken into consideration. These types of considerations normally put Eaton’s solutions well ahead of our competitors.
- Large Global Enterprise Business such as PWC.
- International businesses often find the procurement and deployment processes of new IT solutions much less stressful on the organization when they standardize on solutions with global manufacturers. Whether it’s the deployment of a standardized storage solution or a migration to a virtualized environment, changes in the server configuration at the IT level mean that changes in power and power management are inevitable. Eaton is a worldwide manufacturer of these power management solutions and we do business in over 150 countries around the globe. With the means to supply sales, service and support locally to international business is of huge benefit to these customers.
- Municipalities like City of St. Catherine’s
- The infrastructure of a city which houses several departments, usually requires a rather large data centre. Eaton holds the number 1 market share position globally on the solutions that are typically used to support these types of data centres. Moving, upgrading, refreshing or building a new data centre of this caliber usually means 9 out of 10 times, that an Eaton UPS has previously been in place and thus will be a requested solution to be quoted.
“Power today can no longer be an ‘after thought.’ Converged infrastructure is the new virtualization,” Tardy said.
Power is no longer about slowly shutting down the operating system to ensure there is no loss of data.
In 2014 it is about the ability to move one virtual machine from one physical host to another seamlessly, efficiently and cost effectively through high quality business continuity practices and great technology.