As the need to optimize the physical infrastructure through simplification, increased agility and operational efficiency comes into greater focus, it's clear the message for smart data centers and a unified physical infrastructure is resonating with enterprises.
I had the opportunity to speak recently with Panduit's Mike Pula, the company's analyst relations manager, and he explained how Panduit's relationship with industry leading advisor and research firm Gartner has formed a coalition to promote a reduction in risk for customers. Companies have the opportunity to ultimately turn today's improvements in IT infrastructure and process efficiency into business advantages in the near and far future.
"One of the key messages that both of us embrace is risk reduction for our clients," Pula said. "As customers are making some very hard decisions and going forward in taking a look at how they are going to get more density in the data center, how they are going to be able to consolidate and be able to bring more value to their customers, it is necessary for the customers to be educated. It is necessary for them to be able make the right decisions and have the whole picture in front of them so that they are not just making decisions based on the current standards, which are great in and of themselves, but they are only a piece of the whole puzzle that must be taken into account."
That is one of the key points in understanding Panduit's UPI vision. The industry tradition has thus been a "piece-part" approach, which unfortunately doesn't address your power, cooling or space kinds of challenges. Panduit's approach is to put together a complete reference architecture around all of these different pieces, and bring them together to help customers manage risk within the physical infrastructure by intelligently converging physical and logical systems.
And with the economy seemingly stabilizing, Panduit's UPI vision message will become that much stronger, Pula said, underscoring that today's business climate is an ideal time for companies to ready themselves for the opportunities that exist on the horizon in the new economy.
