Why an APAC CIO thinks of DCIM differently?

Pratima H

MUMBAI, INDIA: She is not a neurosurgeon but somehow she is able to spot subtle nuances of a CIO’s psychology with impressive precision and courage. From challenging the nooks of imagination to confronting on-ground realities, Neha Kumar, Sr. Research Analyst, Gartner lets her sharp curiosity tread around many not-so-obvious terrains of an emerging market’s mindset.

Distilling a latest report ‘Emerging Market Analysis: Targeting Your Top DCIM Markets in Asia/Pacific and Latin America’, she weighs in that global DCIM providers attempting to gain traction in emerging markets can face competition from local players offering complete DCIM tools, as well as partial DCIM solutions or DCIM-like capabilities and how vendors run the risk of losing potential customers interested in only some of the benefits.

As that happens, how would emerging currents like self-service, appliance-formats, convergence, and the Safe-Harbor policy changes impact the bundle of doubts that this region’s customers have when it comes to DCIM investments? We ask her and she tables a detailed X-ray of an enterprise’s data centre anatomy.

Ok, to start with, the report tosses out quite a paradox. So the top emerging markets of China, India and Brazil offer the best opportunities for reach when it comes to global DCIM solution providers but at the same time understanding of DCIM's complete value proposition or scope is relatively blurred when we compare emerging markets with mature markets. What marks this difference?

There is indeed a difference in market-buying behavior. The clarity on what a DCIM solution actually delivers is better in mature markets. In emerging markets they still tend to confuse it with other infrastructure tools like ITOM or BMS. That’s why we tell vendors to focus on market education along with brand awareness. Also, in order for DCIM to be purposeful the infrastructure has to be intelligent enough to pull that data but that could not be everywhere in emerging markets.

Would the recent US-Europe Safe Harbor dynamics further deepen the regional variations in data centre purchasing behavior or footprints?

There are so many kinds of data centres – corporate ones, cloud ones, co-location ones. Vendors would need to recognize that a customer can use the data centre with different end purposes in mind. It can be a service or co-location or DR. Now management of any data centre is ultimately a scenario to reckon with. We see new geographies picking up and future deployments can be higher in new markets. It is the right time for vendors to position themselves smartly.

When you say positioning, how much would modularity or in-country support matter?

When it comes to data centre design, companies expanding in emerging markets are trying to replicate their best practices. There is a lot of scope in APAC and Brazil too is a hot pocket in Latin America. A DCIM, is after all, a broad module. It comes with so many features and not everyone wants all of them. Vendors need to realize that while one feature, say power management, may be apt for an emerging market; another one, like capacity utilization, will work better for someone in the US market. They don’t need to alter the product, but they have to change the message.Even who you talk to will change – in emerging markets this would be a DCIM or fund manager but in mature markets, this would be someone from IT or facilities side.

It is going to help to localize go-to-market strategy to tap the opportunity in emerging markets. Build in-country operations or consider partnering with local vendors to add the important local angle. There are times when trouble-shooting cannot happen remotely and that’s when local support is crucial. One cannot overlook integration confidence and thankfully many vendors have started realizing this concern. Yet even some global leaders lack that prudence while smaller ones are filling this gap. They need to wake up to this gap.

So what can vendors start doing right?

Their approach should essentially be tailor-made for the regions they want to address. In smaller regions, large scale data centres can’t work out but they would still have some needs and even smaller footprints can pay well in volumes. Do not tweak the product, tweak the positioning. Educate prospect client organizations in emerging markets about the need for and scope of DCIM tools to stimulate future demand. Like we discussed earlier, they can modularize a DCIM solution so that budget-sensitive enterprises can adopt it based on the immediate problem they have. Then they can work to grow their deployment by demonstrating how adding modules can increase utilization, assist in capacity planning and improve ROI. Vendors have to be respectful of the fact that most emerging market enterprises are not necessarily looking to automate activities that are currently done by their extensive workforce; so they would need to adjust messaging accordingly.

Why?

The huge capital requirement of a complete DCIM solution dampens the initial investment plans of budget-sensitive customers in emerging markets. In workforce-abundant countries, such as India and China, DCIM features whose outcome is to replace people are not considered a benefit.

When you say workforce, would automation and self-service features inject serious displacement concerns?

When we look at data centres globally, uptime is a major demand. Using resources to manage a vast infrastructure becomes important but in workforce-abundant regions like China and India there is no dire need for automation. Here people are not struggling with resource crunch or travel issues. So instead of automation’s major premise, a vendor can talk about using resources in better places and ways.

Converged infrastructures and appliances are becoming important trends. Would that affect DCIM strategies?

This essentially means that now management capabilities reside in software and hardware becomes a commodity. DCIM basically enables a data centre here. It assists in software empowerment for the application. It works as a bridge.

Does virtualization cause horizontal scalability barriers?

For virtualization to work, it is essential that it works across different devices and platforms. A good DCIM should be able to talk to IT, power, management etc. It should be able to drill down to physical, virtual servers to the lowest level. Otherwise, it becomes superficial information. Most DCIM solutions can push down to lowest virtual levels. But yes, scalability in terms of moving across diverse platforms is a concern. Vendor-neutrality becomes significant in horizontal scalability.

How do you read Alibaba’s $1 billion spree as it expands across US with new data centres? Is it a new reverse course from APAC to US or a parallel direction?

I would call it a parallel trajectory. There is so much scope and planning and we see infrastructure deals happening all around and so much growth is moving forth. We have seen ages of innovation coming out of US markets and then channelized to Asian markets. Now things are changing.