As enterprise community looks for next generation-ready data center solutions, Emerson Network Power India is continuously engaged towards injecting new age innovations in its data center offerings towards enterprise and SMB customers in India.
The company’s Smart Solutions are mini datacenters in itself which come with precision cooling, UPS, power management, monitoring, control technologies, and fire suppression facilities which makes it a smart buy for organizations, giving them good RoI as well as reducing OpEx.
Ankesh Kumar, Director, Product Management (Channel, IT Solution) & Marketing, Emerson Network Power India speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s core focus and its future plans to strengthen its data center business.
What are the key priorities for Emerson when it comes to data center space? What are some of the innovative offerings in the data center space that the company is positioning for India in the near term?
Datacenters are the need of the hour considering the large amount of data being generated every minute, both online and offline. It has now become the key to a successful business where organizations across verticals are storing and processing company as well customer data and thus, the need for DCIM (Datacenter Infrastructure Management) solutions is on the rise.
In the datacenter space we have two key priorities- Smart Solutions and Trellis. Our smart solutions are aimed at SMEs, who lack capital and space to invest in full-fledged datacenters and looking for cost effective options with an easy interface.
Our Smart Solutions are mini datacenters in itself which come complete with precision cooling, UPS, power management, monitoring, control technologies, and fire suppression facilities which makes it a smart buy for organizations, giving them good return on investment as well as reducing operational costs.
Our second key priority is the Trellis platform, which is considered by experts to be a ground-breaking DCIM innovation leveraging the entire breadth of our full offering from asset, power, cooling design and management solution to embedded server firmware and management capabilities. Most recently research firm Gartner adjudged Emerson Network Power as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for DCIM Tools for 2015. We were ranked highest for our ability to execute within the “Leaders” quadrant with the core strategy built the flagship DCIM solution- the Trellis™ platform.
How does the company look at the emerging data center virtualization space?
There has been a massive explosion in the IT space across sectors and companies are looking at adopting newer technologies that can increase efficiency and reduce labour. With our Trellis platform we offer our customers the technology that bridges the gap between facilities and IT operations in the data center, allowing IT to be a key player in planning and executing the organization’s growth initiatives.
The Trellis platform helps control and operate datacenters from their smartphones and allowing them to manage their datacenters on the go. We believe that this is a path breaking innovation for customers who are looking at solution to control complex data center.
What are the big trends that are redefining the business dynamics today?
With the India datacenter market set to touch a reach about 2 billion in 2016, below are some of the trends that will come to play in the coming year.
Cloud gets complicated
Most organizations are now using cloud computing to some degree and we will likely see an evolution from SaaS to true hybrid environments, in which cloud services could be used to bring greater agility to legacy facilities. Due to this cloud willget more complex. The push to right sized datacenters is an essential step in managing energy consumption; however, the potential for unused data center capacity to become part of a shared-service, distributed cloud computing model will also be explored, enabling enterprise data centers to sell their excess capacity in the open market.
Data Centers Will Communicate ina Common Language
The Internet of Things (IoT) will not only impact future data center architectures by increasing the volume of data that must be processed, it will also change data center management—and the latter sooner than the former. Today’s data centers include thousands of devices that speak a host of languages, including IPMI, SNMP, and Mod Bus.
This creates gaps between systems that limit efforts to manage holistically. That limit will cease to exist as Redfish, an open systems specification for data center and systems management developed by Emerson Network Power, Intel, Dell and HP, gains traction.
What is the go to Market strategy that you have for India?
Channel partners play a very important role in our growth considering they constitute our go to market strategy. All our products and solutions are available through our channel partners, thereby elevating them as a solution provider status with complete critical infrastructure offering.
Along with this, we have also enabled them with the right training and have given them an understanding how we plan to achieve our goals with the right bit of incentives as per our channel promotional plans. Apart from the training, we are also enhancing their returns by continuously tweaking our policies for their benefit.
What has elicited positive response from partners is the tie-up with PAYBACK so that our VARs and NSPs can now redeem their reward points from over 50 leading PAYBACK partner brands. This allows them to club their points and choose rewards of their liking on sales of the Emerson portfolio.
Where is the big growth happening for the company?
The increasing amount of SMBs SMEs and start-ups coming up in India has opened up a lot of opportunities for growth for companies like Emerson Network Power to play a major role in the day to day operations of businesses. SMBs and SMEs belonging to any sector be it financial services, manufacturing, IT/ITES are always on the lookout for cost efficient IT solutions to help them improve customer service, increase business efficiency and efficacy.
Due to this, these businesses which operate on a small bottom-line are constantly finding ways to decrease operational expenses for e.g. upgrading IT infrastructure in the best cost effective way as possible. This is where we as a company have an opportunity for growth.
Our Smart Solutions can play a huge role in keeping the IT infrastructure of these SMBs and SMEs agile and secure running 24×7. Considering that Emerson’s go-to-market strategy is through the channel, all our partners too get a unique chance to tap the latent market opportunity and grow.
Accordingly, we have been promoting various solutions from the Avocent portfolio for partners by incentivizing them through the ‘Avocent Accelerate’ program to help create more traction for our product portfolio.
