IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview with Pete Malcolm, President and CEO of Power Assure

In the below interview, Pete Malcolm from Power Assure outlines top trends in data center management today.

• Q. What’s the current status of the DCIM market in your opinion?

A. Numerous systems management software both for IT and facilities have been commonly deployed in data centers. In recent years, Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software was added to this mix in order to increase operational and energy efficiency in data centers, particularly with power becoming the biggest component of operational expenses. The idea was that with the insight gained through monitoring and commissioning data center assets continuously, operators would be able to maximize power and space in their data centers, cut costs and significantly improve energy efficiency, and even improve reliability.  The theory was sound however things were more complicated when theory met reality.  DCIM solutions have been deployed at a number of data centers around the world though there seems to be no end in sight for the DCIM market’s lengthy procurement cycles, which has resulted in arrested growth curves for many suppliers and thus a limited installed base.

• Q. Why haven’t more data centers deployed DCIM solutions today?

A. To most data center operators DCIM became yet another thing to “deal with” in the data center.  DCIM software adoption has had significant challenges particularly as it relates to integration with existing systems, long deployment time, high implementation and maintenance costs, and a long ROI. Also, a crowded market (50+ suppliers), abundance of various, complex features and functions and lack of a clear value proposition made data center operators reluctant to bring DCIM solutions into their data center environments.  These problems have been dogging the DCIM market for several years and limiting the rate of adoption, despite significant product improvements.

• Q. What other trends influence DCIM?

A. The problems in the DCIM market didn’t slow down the innovation and the market acceptance that was taking place in the IT Service Management and IT Operations Management sectors. As DevOps, asset management, change management and service ticketing moved to the cloud, the case to carry DCIM to the cloud as an added functionality to the existing enterprise IT management systems gained strength and this only made sense: Why wouldn’t you have your live metrics across all your data centers delivered to your asset management environment?

• Q. How would DCIM work in the cloud?

A. Most DCIM suppliers attempt to provide all-in-one suites however they end up executing many aspects of DCIM badly instead of one really well.  Here at Power Assure, we leveraged one of our core strengths, a key component of our IP; we focused on live metrics collection and analysis.  We view the real-time data collected as another dimension of information associated to the IT assets.  Therefore we believe that having live and historical performance, power consumption and environmental data from the data center and its assets in the cloud seamlessly integrated to an ITSM environment, is precisely the solution necessary to overcome the challenges of DCIM tools today.  And that’s exactly what we did – we built Power Assure EM/5 specifically to make third party solutions “super smart.”  Ideally, what you want is a SaaS DCIM platform offered in the cloud that integrates across IT and facilities, including asset management and / or IT service management environments, such as ServiceNow, to encompass the entire data center ecosystem without being limited to its specific aspects like cooling and without requiring software agents.

• Q. What are the benefits and drawbacks of a DCIM offering in the cloud?

A. DCIM in the cloud not only improves usability and scalability but is also significantly more cost effective as SaaS models are priced based on user and/or consumption whereas typical enterprise models are priced based on size and deployment costs are very low, if any – which also makes a quick ROI much more likely.  Using a cloud based platform, customers can experience a working DCIM solution in a matter of hours, demonstrating value in just a few days instead of having to work through the extensive and costly initial deployment phase.  Over the cloud DCIM can be instantly deployed at the desired scale to users that are geographically located at different sites.  DCIM-as-a-Service enables data center operators to gain access to a full featured platform with a relatively small to no initial investment without the ongoing maintenance costs that are associated with on-premise deployments.

Pete Malcolm is President and CEO of Power Assure. Pete is a serial entrepreneur and technologist with a software industry career spanning more than 30 years. His broad experience includes technology, product development, sales, marketing, and senior management roles, in companies ranging from start-ups to software giants. Pete was formerly CEO of cloud management company Abiquo, which he joined in 2009. Previously he was CTO of Orchestria, a leading data loss prevention company providing email and Web monitoring solutions to Wall Street banks and other financial institutions, which he founded in 2000 and was acquired by CA Technologies. Prior to Orchestria, Pete served as Benchmark Capital’s first European Entrepreneur in Residence, and as Senior Vice President of Business Management with CA Technologies. He was founder and CEO of IQ International, a UK-based technology start-up responsible for the open file backup techniques now adopted in millions of operating systems worldwide. Pete is named as inventor on over 150 patent applications, which have been granted in more than 20 countries world-wide.