What Partners Need To Know About Eaton’s Approach To Powering AI And Supporting Growth
AI is growing fast, and that means infrastructure has to keep up. Power, cooling and sustainability are now front and center for solution providers trying to meet new demands. CRNtv host Sydney Neely speaks with Christian Abel, vice president of sales, distributed infrastructure at Eaton, about how the company is helping partners scale smarter.
Sydney: Christian, with Paulo Ruiz officially stepping into the CEO role at Eaton as of June 1, 2025, I’d love to hear your perspective on the company’s growth strategy under his leadership. How do you see this transition influencing Eaton’s approach to distributed infrastructure and its broader partner ecosystem?
Christian: A core theme to Paulo’s strategy is actually focused on distributed infrastructure. That’s aligned with our growth through major secular megatrends. We have three pillars behind this strategy: leading, investing and executing for growth. But really, all three align with us becoming more customer centric.
That means making sure we have the right people and the right incentives in place to stay ahead of market trends. We want to be able to move fast with high standards. It’s important for us to align with our partner community and focus on operational excellence—making it easier for partners to do business with Eaton. Simplifying processes, improving our partner tools and speeding up how partners can access Eaton’s solutions are all on the agenda.
Sydney: We know AI workloads are pushing infrastructure to the limit. What are some of the real-world challenges partners are running into around power and cooling—and how is Eaton responding?
Christian: AI workloads are indeed pushing data center infrastructure to its limits, especially in the white space—the server room itself. Partners building and upgrading data centers for AI are encountering real-world hurdles with both power delivery and cooling.
Racks full of AI servers, GPUs and accelerators consume three to 10 times more power than typical enterprise racks, which in turn generates three to 10 times more heat in the same footprint. Partners are also seeing hotspots and cooling inefficiencies when trying to run these high-density racks on older cooling setups.
In short, delivering enough power and removing enough heat are the key challenges. Eaton has developed heavy-duty rack enclosures and busway power distribution systems ready for the increased weight and power demands of liquid-cooled racks. We also provide backup power solutions dedicated to the cooling loop. Our UPS systems are integrated to keep cooling pumps and fans running without interruption—even during a power outage or power quality issue.
Sydney: When it comes to partner support, what are some of the tools, programs or resources that are making the biggest difference for your partners right now?
Christian: Eaton partners are thriving thanks to a suite of support tools and programs we’ve put in place—especially our PowerAdvantage Partner Program. It’s a great program that offers protection through deal registration, market development funds and performance-based incentive rebates. We try to make it easy and profitable to add Eaton to their solutions.
What we’ve seen is that partners who participate in the PowerAdvantage Program see year-over-year growth of more than 23 percent. And the last thing I’d highlight is our channel marketing support—it’s a big differentiator.
From evolving power needs to long-term sustainability, Eaton is giving partners the tools to lead with confidence. Learn more or explore the PowerAdvantage Program at PowerAdvantage.Eaton.com/CRN.