Many successful IT resellers have focused on creating specialty practices to add depth to their offerings in specific areas, such as security, storage or disaster recovery. Now is a great time to build a different type of specialty practice-a power practice-developing the capacity to become a trusted business advisor to customers on the essential foundation for which the entire IT infrastructure relies: reliable, quality power.
As sales of IT hardware lag and margins on servers and storage systems grow slimmer, a power practice opens up some promising new sources of revenue. When customers make capital investments in servers, storage devices and other IT equipment, they need to protect them from power issues. Failure to protect these systems could end up being a catastrophic problem for their business.
Customers are looking for the total turnkey solution and resellers go great lengths to create the right infrastructure and the right IT environment. Not protecting that infrastructure appropriately is neglecting the opportunity to “insure” the client’s equipment and data, not to mention neglecting a possible revenue source for the reseller.
The costs of unplanned downtime are very high. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, a cellular communications company loses an average of $41,000 per hour of downtime. An airline reservations center loses about $90,000. A credit card operations center stands to lose more than $2.5 million per hour (Distributed Energy Resources Program and Strategic Plan, 2001). The costs are even higher today.Customers with complex supply chains and critical e-commerce systems cannot afford any downtime for any reason. The opportunity here is to bundle uninterruptible power system (UPS) protection with the sale, or at least looking at the support infrastructure to determine if upgrades should be recommended.Consider the following important factors to be a trusted advisor and grow your business.
Incremental revenues from remote monitoring
Even if present power system capacity is sufficient, resellers might find opportunity to upgrade the functionality with remote monitoring. UPSs can be configured with communication cards to enable the UPS-or all the enterprise’s UPSs-to be monitored from a remote location.
Recurring revenue from maintenance contracts
Recurring revenue from maintenance and service contracts is a big boon for solution providers. While other hardware revenues may slump, resellers can count on having that recurring revenue from the installed base.
New revenues from pre-sales consulting
Power audits at customer sites reveal surprising weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Oftentimes, UPSs are plugged in that have no battery runtime left; or, a customer has moved to a virtualized environment and the power demand has outgrown the UPS, which was not upgraded when virtualization was implemented; or situations where they are using older UPSs that are only 70 to 80 percent efficient, and a new UPS could have a significant impact on cost and heat.
Through this kind of consulting engagement, resellers open up the door to a stronger relationship with the customer, consulting with them on how to get their power consumption under control in a way that is more efficient, cost-effective and manageable.
For all its advantages, virtualization has brought some unique challenges for your customer’s power system. Overall, power consumption is lower, but consumption per server and per rack is far higher, and it can be highly variable as applications are dynamically reallocated. There are fewer servers, but each one is more critical than ever. Users need higher density power protection closer to servers.
New UPSs on the market answers these questions by bringing higher density to the rack level in a modular fashion-from one to five building blocks, from 12 kW in only 6U to a 60 kW system with N+1 redundancy in a single rack. Eaton has also partnered with VMware® to develop power management software optimized for virtualized environments. Now, customers have a single console to manage networked servers (virtual and physical), power and storage – no matter how complex the environment.
Energy Costs
Energy represents anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of data center operating costs. That’s a big portion of the budget to be relatively untracked and unmanaged. Now is a good time to equip customer’s power systems with monitoring capabilities to see the health and status of power distribution, power quality and backup power systems from any location.
With power monitoring, resellers can prevent tripped circuits, understand where new IT systems can be deployed, balance loads, diagnose power problems, and improve the overall energy efficiency of the data center.
By tacking power consumption by individual outlets, resellers can bill departments, business entities or managed services customers for the actual energy they use. With proactive planning, resellers can identify trends, perform capacity planning, and prepare a logical evolution path to head off trouble or a capacity bottleneck before it occurs.
IT leaders continue to grapple with some harsh realities. The cost of powering and cooling the data center is outpacing the cost of IT resources themselves. High-density equipment pushes power and cooling systems to the max. Moves, adds and changes can turn the power infrastructure into a deck of cards, at risk of overloads, tripped circuits and unplanned shutdowns.As a trusted advisor with a strong power practice, resellers have the means to mitigate those concerns while building their businesses. Moreover, they should ask themselves:
• Am I doing all I can to protect my customers’ IT investments, applications and data?
• Am I leveraging the full potential of power-related sales, including monitoring and services?
• Are my customers’ power infrastructures optimized for today’s realities, such as virtualization and blade servers?
• Have I integrated high-efficiency UPSs and power distribution units (PDUs) to improve efficiency and reduce heat in the data center?
These questions represent promising opportunities for resellers to grow their businesses by assuring that customers’ IT systems, applications and data are well protected.
