Partner Connection: Unlocking The Mystery Of What Goes On Inside The Data Center
The rise of the cloud has led to questions about what can be moved out of the data center. The short answer… not everything.
’There’s more questions than there have ever been before. You got some things on premise, you’ve got some things in the cloud and kind of everywhere in between, and so it makes the decisions more complicated. ’What do I do?’’ says Katie Boeh, director of channel marketing and communications at APC.
There are three key challenges that partners face when looking at their customers’ distributed environments today:
- Understanding what assets are out there
- Knowing what’s going on with those assets
- Finding solutions that fit into existing business models
And APC is helping partners solve all three problems with a single platform.
’We’re taking our data center infrastructure management software capabilities that we had for years, our StruxureWare products, and bringing them into a cloud-based model,’ says Boeh.
Leveraging IoT technology, EcoStruxure IT uses a cloud-based gateway to give partners visibility into customers’ entire data center ecosystem, including remote sites.
’We’re giving them the visibility and now they can go to one location through our partner dashboard and identify all the customers that they have, and they can click on the customer and they can see what assets are there,’ says Larry Hann, director of channel digital services at APC. ’We can provide the actual intelligence back to the partners, so they can go have a conversation about what to do next and where to spend their next dollar.’
Now that partners can see inside customer environments, how can they use those insights to create data-driven relationships?
’They can proactively tell their customers what’s going on with their environment and fix problems before they start, but also walk in and tell them something they didn’t know. For example, I can save you money on overprovisioned storage because I can see all these things that are happening and glean some actionable insights from that that will help me plan where I put my next IT stack,’ says Boeh.
And partners don’t have to completely change their business models to start using EcoStruxure IT.
’They’ve already made investments in how they’re actually developing their business or providing services to their customers, so they want us to be able to snap into what they’ve already been investing in before,’ says Hann. ’It’s going to have APIs the partners can tie in to. They can just pull the data that’s important to them and plug it into their existing tool, so they can get the information they need, but they can do it in a way that they’re already conducting business today.’