"Optimizing the Datacenter is going to be the key trend": Sanjay Motwani, Raritan

Sanjay Motwani, Regional Director - APAC at Raritan explains the downfall of KVM and talks about the trends in datacenter future with PC Quest. 

Sanjay Motwani, Regional Director - APAC, Raritan

How does Raritan see the PDU Vs KVM Market?

Raritan has been in the data center space for more than 30 years now. We started in the KVM space, but the KVM market has seen a slow decline over the years due to increased virtualization and introduction of plate chassis and plate servers. Besides that, some of the KVM functionalities were being incorporated directly into the servers by the vendors. These factors played a major role in Raritan’s shift to the intelligent PDU market.

When we migrated from the KVM to the PDU space, we kept several factors in mind such as the compute load and the power consumed by the IT infrastructure. When we introduced intelligent PDUs in the market, there was not much awareness about it. So, we started to educate the market about the need to have intelligent PDUs in the data center space and that is how it has grown substantially over the years. Today, PDUs contribute substantially to our global revenues, while revenues from the KVM space have gone down.

What are the Indian figures in PDU Vs KVM?

If we talk about India, the ratio can be 60:40 for PDU and KVM respectively. This is because the adoption of technology in India is relatively slow—India is about four years behind the USA and Europe in terms of technology adoption. Australia is the only region in Asia Pacific, which is probably the closest to the US when it comes to technology adoption.

What is your GTM strategy post acquisition?

It is not easy to integrate or offer products on a single common platform. After Legrand acquired us, we wanted to offer holistic data center solutions. Today, we are offering all kinds of solutions like KVMs, PDUs, environment sensors, down the line UPSs, Cable management, structured cabling, cable trays etc. Currently, we are trying to integrate the teams from multiple companies into one for the Indian market. This team, called the data center division team, will take some time to get sorted out. We are conducting training sessions at the backend currently.

How Raritan is working on SMB sector? What are the opportunities there?

Traditionally, Raritan has been into the enterprise space and accounts for 80% of our revenues. We also focus on mid-market as well. It is good to see that the smaller companies are also moving to the cloud and that has opened up a plethora of opportunities in the sector, which has largely being managed by the channel community. When SMBs move down the line, our channel team will be there to offer trainings and solutions to them. In fact, cloud providers are one of our larger customers. They will need the right kind of infrastructure and tools to manage data center operations, which is where we come in. We have two distributors: Inflow Technologies and Exclusive Networks. We have also created a team of dedicated 11 service partners across the country who are extensively trained on our products.

What are the verticals, where most uptakes of PDUs and KVMs are happening?

You would be surprised to know that the major uptake of PDUs and KVMs takes place at R&D labs at government research centers for space research, BHEL etc and not sectors like BFSI, IT and Telecom, which all come under secondary verticals. This is because the R&D labs have to cater to the changing marketplace. They have to be ready for what’s coming 3 years down the line. So, they have to continuously test and work on lot of equipment at the backend. KVM is the only solution that can work in this highly heterogeneous environment.

In terms of data center infra, what are the key trends that most of the organizations are looking for?

It is very clear that optimizing the data center is going to be a key trend for a long time to come and this trend has been growing rapidly in the past two to three years. The dynamics of the changing marketplace, where IT is not just a business enabler but is a key player that provides a huge competitive edge, is prompting companies to be extremely agile in dealing with the growth of their IT infrastructure. If I were the CIO, I would not only think of technology, but also in terms of consumer behavior and consumer access points to see how I can adapt and modify my infrastructure to deal with the changing marketplace. Today, CIOs are forced to optimize their data center infrastructure to the hilt in every aspect be it power, storage, real estate etc. There are various tools that are available to help optimize the data center in every aspect. So optimization will be there for long.

What are the advantages of a hyper converged infrastructure in the Indian context?

Hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest-growing category in the data center hardware market and will reach $5 billion, which is 24% of the market, by 2019, according to Gartner. It is the most efficient enabler of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and will be in mainstream use in the next five years.

Some of its advantages including greater flexibility, scalability, cost efficiency and ease of management have prompted CIOs to add HCI to their wish list. Organizations are adopting converged solutions faster as it helps them to develop and run applications in a more flexible and less expensive way with the benefits of shared computing and storage resources. It also ensures utmost availability of data security with high fault tolerance so that data is safe even in the case of network failure.

Besides, Hyper Convergence ensures secure mobility and hence affords greater mobility to workforce and applications. It provides an easier and smarter way to access the virtual capabilities from any location as long as it is connected to the network in a secured and protected environment.