State of Technology: Big Names Make Power Play

Consider the lowly power protector, perhaps the most overlooked, underrated bit of gear in an IT arsenal. Tucked away at the bottom of--if not behind--the rack, it altogether lacks the cachet of the sexier data-center denizens.

Few care about power protection--that is, until the electricity hiccups.

Solution providers have long known that, even as UPSes approached commoditization, their inclusion in any complete IT system is a given. Nothing can save your bacon when the alternating current surges or the lights go out like that nondescript box doing its unglamorous job. But now, as power-protection vendors try hard to differentiate their wares in an increasingly competitive market, VARs are finding new ways to package solution and service opportunities around the latest in UPS equipment. Driving that effort are innovations in power protection that allow resellers to mate UPSes with the latest in space-saving blade gear and the newest rack technologies, such as integrated cooling.

"Over the past few years, we've seen power protection go from an afterthought to a forethought," says Kevin Nusky, product line manager for American Power Conversion's InfraStruXure products. "This has been driven in part by the ever-changing needs technology places on the IT infrastructure, with new application deployments such as blade servers and network convergence."

Befitting its place at the foundation of IT, power-protection gear is still valued largely for its dependability, but, according to solution providers responding to VARBusiness' most recent quarterly State of Technology survey, the channel is also looking for value, improved performance and technological innovation.

"Identification of opportunities is as simple as finding hot, disorganized or filled data centers," says Al Lepeau, director of mid-Atlantic business development for Logicalis, an APC reseller in Woodstock, Md. "Once customers understand the value of a solution provider who can implement technology from wall to wall and floor to ceiling in the data center, they become very loyal to them."

Lepeau says he values data-center infrastructure vendors such as APC, which have "mastered the high-quality integration of power, cooling, racking, security and cable management.

But just how innovative are power-protection equipment vendors as a whole?

The majority of survey respondents (77 percent) see UPS technology as average or better in innovation, a ranking mostly in line with other common technologies such as printers or networking gear. Indeed, 25 percent ranked the innovation of UPSes as high or very high.

Reliability and ease of use, though, are getting the most attention. While most respondents view ROI efforts and new functionality as average, those areas garnered the highest number of negative votes, too, indicating dissatisfaction among about 10 percent of respondents.

It's worth noting, however, that small VARs were more satisfied with UPS ROI than their large counterparts--by a margin of nearly 2-to-1.

When it comes to choosing power-protection equipment, VARs of various sizes brought different concerns to the table. Smaller players were focused overwhelmingly on performance (84 percent), while midsize VARs were a little more evenly split between performance and cost (77 percent and 59 percent, respectively). And while margins and durability were certainly on the minds of the large solution providers, the quality of vendors' maintenance contracts rated significantly higher for the big players (24 percent) than for small and midsize VARs (11 percent and 18 percent, respectively).

"VARs that can successfully remove the infrastructure barriers to application deployment for their customers will often find themselves discussing opportunities beyond just power protection and including rack, cooling and management solutions," says APC's Nusky. "Building a solid [infrastructure] for a customer's network not only provides a reliable foundation for technology upgrades and future expansion but also allows the VAR to expand the sale and add value."

NEXT: Vendors that inspire VAR confidence.