How Eaton Is Future-Proofing IT Infrastructure

Channel partners are navigating growing energy demands, rising infrastructure costs and the accelerating shift toward smarter, more sustainable IT environments. In the middle of all this change, having a partner with insight, innovation and staying power has never been more important. Eaton is helping resellers not only adapt but thrive.

To discuss what that support looks like in action, CRNtv host Sydney Neely sat down with Linsey Miller, senior vice president and general manager of distributed IT at Eaton.

Sydney: You stepped into this role at a pivotal time. What are some of the key trends you’re seeing across the industry, and how is Eaton helping partners respond?

Linsey: I think we’re all hearing the buzzword of AI here a lot, but beneath that is really all the accelerated workloads that we need to support all of the businesses that are growing. And with that comes the need for more and more power.

The key concern there is that the industry is growing at a faster rate than the available power in the utility market. And so we’re having to get creative about other ways to find that, but the key concern for our business and customers is the increasing cost of power.

So, our focus with our partners is to help them design future-proof power architectures for those accelerated workloads. And the good news is that for our partners, it means that they can increase the amount of solutions that they provide and grow their businesses by partnering with Eaton.

Sydney: Partnership can mean a lot of different things in this space. How does Eaton define it, and what makes your approach different?

Linsey: Our go-to-market has always been with our channel partners and enabling their success.

If we tried to do everything ourselves, we would have a certain level of success. But if we can amplify that impact through the experts that we rely on, we can be better for our partners. So, it’s a two-way street.

The thing I love about our channel partners is they are the experts in their markets. They know their local markets. They know their customers. They know their application focus areas, whether it’s medical, education, banking, they’re the experts.

So, our focus is really on that two-way street of learning from them and innovating for them and then making sure that we’re enabling them to be those trusted partners to our end customers in the markets that we serve.

Sydney: A major theme we continue to hear is around future-ready infrastructure. What is Eaton doing to help partners build solutions that are powerful, sustainable and scalable?

Linsey: We’re trying to think always a step ahead. You know, we see the trends and if we go and park our brains five years in the future and we work our way backward, we can make better decisions for our customers and our partners that are serving their needs.

So, when we look at that, you know, back to what we talked about earlier, accelerated computing brings more and more power-hungry needs to every enterprise and we need to do more on-prem. We need to generate more power on premises versus just getting it the traditional ways.

And so that means that we’re not only designing solutions that can handle higher power, but we’re helping those organizations adapt to a mix of computing that’s on-prem, in the cloud and power that comes from the grid and power that can be generated on site or with battery backups.

So that’s something we’ve always done. But what we can do better is really help educate our channel partners more on what’s coming at them so they can increase the amount of solutions that they deliver to those customers.

And we learn from them, but we learn from our expertise in the market, which is power and cooling and infrastructure, so that we can do it in the best way possible every time they have to solve that problem.

Sydney: Congratulations on the ARC Award win. What does this recognition mean for you and the team?

Linsey: We are super honored to be recognized for this. And some of the feedback that we got as to why we were chosen in this power category was because of our support, the support that we provide to our partners, as well as the innovation with the solutions that we deliver.

So, we’re going to stay focused on that, but we couldn’t have done this without our PowerAdvantage program, which is essentially the success of our resellers and our partners. And so, we believe in essentially a platform of people.

You know, we’ve all in our career tried to grow different ways. We try to grow with the right product or we try to grow by entering a new market, but nothing is as powerful as growing through people and enabling their success. That has been the most successful thing for me personally.

For our team, I think that this award is a testament to that. If we believe in our partners, we stay loyal to our partners, we learn from our partners, we will continue to deliver success for them and that’s our main goal.

To explore Eaton’s latest innovations and how to become a PowerAdvantage Partner, visit poweradvantage.eaton.com/CRN.