APC Ups the Ante with Auxiliary Power

"We grew up providing [power supply solutions

to LANs through resellers," said Rodger Dowdell, president and CEO of APC, based here.

APC is building on that base to offer power infrastructure solutions to data centers with its new PowerStruXure, a modular and scalable UPS. Power-

StruXure comes in a rack-mounted system format that allows solution providers to add additional power supply capability as the customer's needs grow.

"It gets us involved in a market that we've not participated in before," said Steve Reibstein, vice president of enterprise computing at Manchester Technologies, Hauppauge, N.Y. "If someone was building a data center, they would contract with electrical engineers, and everything would be hardwired in. This gives us an opportunity to go in with a modular approach and get a foot in the door early on in the design process. Nobody ever thought there'd be a value proposition in electricity."

Dowdell agreed that the power infrastructure to data centers is usually a highly engineered endeavor for IT power infrastructure specialists.

"PowerStruXure makes the complex systems much easier to deploy and allows the IT solution provider to offer solutions that go into the infrastructure domain, which up until now they have typically not been heavily involved in," Dowdell said. "You may find a reseller who's used to selling the software solutions and the servers and storage, but now they can offer the power distribution and the UPS products along with those servers so that it all works together well."

PowerStruXure gives solution providers an entry point into data-center infrastructure, and margins are "5 to 15 points and usually fall in the 10- to 12-point range," Dowdell said.

To help solution providers make the transition, APC is piloting a channel program for PowerStruXure, he said.

The Reliability Provider channel program includes an Authorized and a Certified status. To become an Authorized Reliability Provider, solution providers must send sales and technical reps to a semiannual training session that lasts one to two days, Dowdell said. In return, solution providers receive a personal Web page, are listed on the APC reseller locator site and become eligible for a volume incentive rebate program.

Certified Reliability Providers must train and maintain a minimum of two dedicated APC product champions for each of the six APC U.S. regions. Solution providers also need presales field systems engineers certified by a major OEM vendor for server technology, storage technology and voice/data network technology.

"The Certified solution provider will go over and above just helping to solve the customer's problem and actually help design [the data center itself," he said.

PowerStruXure Certified partners will receive leads, a listing on the APC partner locator Web site, co-op marketing funds and become eligible for volume incentive rebates, among other benefits.

"We are very early into introducing PowerStruXure into the channel, but some of the early successes have helped solution providers go further upstream in the process of designing a data center than they otherwise would have been able to go without PowerStruXure," he said. "The first thing that data-center managers think about is the power and the cooling, and then later they think about the IT infrastructure."

Dowdell said PowerStruXure is aimed at solution providers serving the SMB space all the way up to Fortune 500 accounts.

"We are in the process of doing a pilot of our training program in six different cities across the United States and then we will go much broader in the United States and expand into Europe and Asia as well," he said.