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Schneider Electric recently used DatacenterDynamics Converged 2012 in London as the launch platform for StruxureWare Data Center Operation for Co-location – a new flavor of the company’s DCIM software which addresses specific needs of multi-tenant data center managers. I caught up with Soeren Brogaard-Jensen, VP Solutions Software to ask him about the preview.
Soeren said, “We’re announcing the Colo edition of StruxureWare for Data Centers, which targets co-locaters: from wholesale to resale to managed cloud providers. We see a high increase in interest for DCIM solutions from this sector and are addressing this in our next release being previewed during DatacenterDynamics London.”
I asked about the new features that are going to be included in this new colo edition.
” Schneider Electric has been working closely with a dozen global colo’s and also local providers to understand their problems and issues and how we can facilitate a more efficient service for their customer. It goes beyond the core operation of a colo facility. What we’ve found out is most colo’s have a lot of inefficiencies in the way they externalize the data on which they base very critical business decisions. Whether it’s upfront in the sale cycle, understanding the criticality and availability levels, to the cost models, to the capacity utilizations across both sites and geographies – it is really complicated for them. So what we are doing is to help digitize their CAD drawings and the underlying data foundation they use to make these decisions. By putting them into our model that helps query the data and model the data in a way that is both faster and more reliable, and assign to the customers in these co-location centers that allow them insight into the services that they are buying or that the co-lo is providing”.
So the new software is not just there to enable co-lo’s to manage their space, power, cooling capacities – it’s also about making those capacities available so the co-lo knows exactly what’s available to sell to their customers.
“That’s it,” said Soeren. “Just a 5% increase in utilisation in an existing data center goes straight to the bottom line. Extending the services is a key theme; customers get a more insightful view into what they are buying and the co-lo can visualise the services in a much more effective way than they could in the past.”
It struck me that this could be very good for the brand of a co-location service provider. The customer has sight of exactly what he or she is spending money on – they know its going to be spent on the right things, and not on oversized equipment, energy waste and the costs that come with that.
“Right,” said Soeren. “The competition is increasing; most co-los are telling me that they want to differentiate their brands around the services they provide; transparency, visibility and the ease and speed of doing business with them. These are all things that Schneider Electric can help with. The software can help build competitive advantage as well as being a tool which they can use to help drive data center efficiency.”
