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

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