Cloud computing defines Data Center trend: Sanjay Zadoo

With 40 branch offices nationwide and boasting of dense network of channel partners, Emerson Network Power is bullish on making its place in the industry and providing innovative solutions in the power market. In an exclusive chat with Kalpana Singhal, Sanjay Zadoo, Country Manager, India, Emerson Network Power tells about company’s goals and how it is positioned in Data Center space.

How does Emerson look at the Indian market?

Emerson Network Power is known world over for providing innovations and solutions in the power market. For businesses around the world, the Emerson brand stands for the ability to get big things done, through global engineering, technology, industry expertise and customer focus. Whatever their challenge, they know that with Emerson by their side, they can Consider It Solved.

India provides a vast ground of opportunities and challenges. We are bullish on the Indian market in the long term and believe in the potential this country can realize. We have invested in ramping up our manufacturing units. With 40 branch offices nationwide and have established a dense network of channel partners across the country.

How competitive is the landscape here?

India has its own set of challenges. While not perfect in terms of policies in manufacturing and major hindrances like parallel imports from China, the government in recent times has tried invigorating this sector leading to the ultimate goal of becoming a major manufacturing hub. Deloitte’s global index, 2013, for 38 nations, has ranked India the fourth most competitive manufacturing nation, behind China, the US and Germany.

India is a very big market that can accommodate many players within an industry. A very small share of the market is cornered by unorganized players, but there is definite shift towards to offering high value and quality services. Also, this sector holds immense opportunities for employment of skilled labour.

Where are the growth opportunities? And how are you gearing up to grab these opportunities?

While India harbors dream of turning into world-class manufacturing hub, there are substantial investments to be made in the infrastructure of the country. Especially the power generation, distribution and transmission sector offer great opportunities through adoption of innovative technologies and renewable energy. But this would require focused investments over a period of years.

India is one of the fastest growing ICT and telecom services market in the world and the enterprise IT spending in 2013 is forecasted to go over 2000 billion rupees. These numbers are quite optimistic and show the huge scope of infrastructure development and new technologies to be deployed. Also, the banking, government, healthcare and media are the industries where we see the greatest demand for our services, other than IT/ITeS and telecommunications sectors.

How does the company look at the converging data centre space in India?

Two dominant trends define today’s data centers – mass adoption of cloud computing & chasing the maximum possible energy efficiency. Arguably one of the most significant developments to hit the IT industry in recent memory (aside from the emerging interest in data center infrastructure management, or DCIM), the widespread adoption of cloud computing applications has fundamentally changed how we think about data centers and the services they are capable of supporting.While cloud computing will certainly continue to challenge the way data center managers look at data center infrastructures, the core challenge has been around long-before the “cloud” became the industry’s go-to buzz word. The true deciding factor is the scale of a data center’s total compute load, with cloud services representing only one part of the broad continuum of compute activity.

Conventional wisdom has been that efficiency and sustainability best practices in the design and deployment of IT and facility infrastructures are the fundamental characteristics of a “green” data center. However, Greenpeace contends that this is only half of the equation, and that the sustainability of the energy source (i.e. coal and fossil fuels versus wind, solar, hydro, biofuels, etc)— as well as energy transparency, infrastructure sitting, greenhouse gas mitigation and the advocacy for the use of renewables—should be factored in to how “green” a data center is perceived.

Where does Emerson solution come into play in today’s complex world of data centres?

Data centers are becoming increasingly complex to build and operate. The two opposing forces of business profitability decisions and energy efficiency regulations are to be monitored closely. Balancing the best practices for data center without making some sacrifices either on capacity front, space utilization or efficiency have been traditionally difficult.

The Trellis platform represents a groundbreaking data center infrastructure management (DCIM) innovation from Emerson Network Power–one that leverages the entire breadth and depth of our full offering, from asset, power, cooling design and management solutions to embedded server firmware and management capabilities. It enables data center managers reduce the TCO, proactively manage energy usage, predict infrastructure failures before they occur, optimize server and power chain headroom, communicate with and control heterogeneous equipment with different communication protocols and physical interfaces and extend the useful life of existing data centers.

Please share your go-to-market strategy? How different it is from other competitors?

Our strategy is centered on the specific solution. Emerson’s technical support is available to channel partners throughout the product cycle, mainly to lure them away from being box-pushers and use our support to adopt a solutions approach. Our products and solutions are developed keeping in mind low TCO, reliability and flexibility of adoption.

What kind of training do you provide to your set of partners in India? Please elaborate.

We have a wide distribution of partners in India categorized according to complexity and technicality they provide through our solutions. We encourage our partners to move beyond product selling to become solution providers. As per their requisites we provide technical & sales training regularly. We arrange regional partner meets and global roadshows regularly. We also hold online training modules for our partners for training in DCIM.Some very good feedback came our way on the web-based configuration tools hosted on Emerson’s channel portal, which helppartners custom design solutions for any customer. As our training & development programs are focussed on these sales representatives, it is only fair to directly recognize their achievements and reward them regularly.

What kind of growth are you looking from India?

We are definitely bullish on our India growth. We will be looking at double-digit growth year on year. As we are not able to share revenue numbers by the country, our global operations clocked sales upwards $6bn in the last fiscal.

How much of this growth will come from system integrators and the enterprise segment?

Our S.I.s contributes about 22% CAGR annually.