9 Insights from Eaton’s 2017 Partner Summit

Power protection was once all about keeping servers up and running during utility outages. Then along came cloud computing, and with it an accelerating migration of on-premises infrastructure into off-premises data centers managed by a handful of hyperscale providers.

“The servers are almost disappearing,” says Herve Tardy (pictured), vice president and general manager of Eaton’s distributed power quality unit for the Americas. “All the servers in the future might be in the hands of five [vendors].”

For Eaton and its partners, that unstoppable trend is driving sales of UPS hardware for data centers down while driving sales of UPS hardware for power-over-Ethernet switches up.

“If you are running all of your IT from the cloud or even from a colo, you want to make sure your network switches are running at all times, otherwise you get nothing,” notes Tardy, who estimates that between 60 and 65 percent of Eaton’s UPS business today involves protecting switches and other gear in network closets.

That’s good news for resellers, according to Curtiz Gangi, sales vice president for U.S. channels in Eaton’s data center segment, because K-12 school districts, higher education institutions, retailers, and hotel chains all have lots of network closets in lots of locations.

“There’s many more closets than there are data centers,” he observes.