If there is one word that strikes fear into the hearts of hardware vendors it’s this: “commodity.” There are very few products that don’t end up competing with a similar product, from a different vendor, offered at a lower price point. And the more fundamentally simple a technology is, the easier it is for someone to commoditize it. This applies just as much in the datacenter as it does on the desktop.
And while they haven’t quite reached the “lowest bidder commodity price” quite yet, power delivery in the datacenter product vendors face a lot of competition from vendors, who in many cases, can build competitive products shortly after vendors who make major technology investments release their latest and greatest. This makes it very hard to maintain a consistent value proposition and product differentiation based solely on hardware. For that reason alone, Emerson Electric, already one of the leading providers of power and cooling systems to datacenters has continued to push the development of the Trellis platform, the datacenter infrastructure management 9DCIM) platform that they first introduced last October, about a year after their acquisition of Avocent who provided the basis for their entry into the DCIM market.
So roughly six months into the DCIM game Emerson sees it as a way to capitalize on the as yet unrealized potential market for DCIM, having seen their Network Power business grow at a faster rate than their overall corporate growth. With Gartner identifying only 1 percent of current datacenters implementing DCIM and forecasting growth to 60 percent of the datacenter market it looks like Emerson has taken the right track, not only to grow their business but also to protect their existence. The ability to manage and monitor the power and cooling infrastructure is likely to be the primary consideration in the purchase of datacenter power and cooling equipment for the next decade.
