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Founded 28 years ago in 1983 in South Africa, Dimension Data today operates in 51 countries in five regions – Middle East & Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia and the Americas. Its growth has been driven by clients’ need to operate efficiently in an environment where collaborative partnerships and the intelligent network have emerged as the two most important business enablers.
DeWald Booysen is Chief Technology Officer of Advanced Infrastructure for the Middle East and Africa at the company, for whom he has been working in partnership with Schneider Electric on data center builds for seven years. Dimension Data provides turnkey solutions for data center operators, delivering everything from build to operation.
I met up with DeWald at Connect 2012 in Kolding, Denmark and I started by asking what he thought about recent introduction of StruxureWare Data Center Operations for Co-location.
DeWald said, “It’s been very exciting; we’ve been dealing with Schneider Electric and using StruxureWare for Data Centers for a couple of years now. They have been very aggressive in changing the product as the client needs and the market changes, and the announcements at this event have been quite good in helping us position ourselves and our services to our clients to ensure we can give them a better service going forward.
Schneider Electric sees their way forward as being primarily software rather than a hardware business, so I asked DeWald if he thought that leading with software is going to open up new opportunities for Dimension Data.
“Absolutely, I think we’ve been selling technologies from Schneider Electric into our clients for many years now, the challenge has always been trying to prove the efficiencies and gains they get from buying the equipment that we provide them. The software platform really encapsulates the solution offering to our clients, ensuring that we can prove that the technologies that we are selling are giving them those savings and benefits.”
I asked DeWald if Dimension Data was experiencing increased interest in Schneider Electric StruxureWare for Data Centers DCIM software.
“Yes, I think there’s a lot more focus [these days] on how you operate your data center over how you build them. It’s become quite critical for businesses to understand how their data centers operate in their business environments, to be able to analyse the performance of those data centers and how it relates to energy savings, regulatory problems that they might have, capacity of their data centers and also future proofing of their environments going forward, absolutely.”
Finally, I asked DeWald what he thought about the new software offering for Co-location service providers.
“Two of our biggest clients are Co-location service providers, and I think Schneider Electric repackaging certain components of StruxureWare for Data Centers DCIM to really address the co-location market has really positioned us well to back our clients and really give them a service fit for their purpose, ensuring that they can provide services to their end users better.”
StruxureWare Data Center Operation for Co-location provides unique business advantages for multi-tenant data center operators. By supplying highly accurate and real-time information about available capacity, service providers will be able to help their customers make timely business decisions and transactions on the go.
