One customer deployment of Vigilent’s system for automated cooling control proved later to be much more than a sale. The deployment resulted in a new equity investor in the company and an instant (and instantly quite substantial) presence in the Japanese market.

The customer was NTT America, the US data center provider subsidiary of the Japanese telecommunications giant. After the client’s data center managers saw a 35% reduction in energy use at their Sterling, Virginia, data center and a 17% reduction at their San Jose, California, data center that followed deployment of the cooling-management solution, they did not believe it, Christopher Kryzan, VP of marketing at Vigilent, said. “They thought we were tweaking the data.”

They did all kinds of tests to verify the savings, taking Vigilent off line and trying to achieve the same energy-use reductions manually. Over a few months, NTT went from being a big skeptic to a big believer, however. It started deploying the solution at more sites in the US and Japan, and eventually making another subsidiary, NTT Facilities, a Vigilent reseller in the Asia Pacific, focusing predominantly on Japan.

Local advantage

That was 18-24 months ago, Kryzan recalls. In October of this year, however, Vigilent announced that NTT Facilities had taken an equity stake in the DCIM company. The companies did not disclose the size of the investment, but Kryzan says it was in the “millions of dollars”.

NTT Facilities is a design and construction firm specializing in data centers and telecommunications facilities. Part of the country’s largest telecom conglomerate, the company has deep roots in the country and strong connections in its industry, which makes it hard to think of a better way for a young US company like Vigilent to expand internationally and especially to expand in Asia. “It opens a lot of doors for us that might take a little bit longer to open otherwise,” Kryzan says.

Another reason this was a big deal for Vigilent was that it had never done business internationally prior to signing the NTT reseller agreement. It went through its first foray into a foreign market with an established local player who knew that market’s rules. “We’re in this for the long haul,” Kryzan says. That takes a lot of foundation building and doing it right. “We don’t want to screw it up. We want to do it the right way.”

A hot market

Any player in the data center space with international ambitions knows that Asia Pacific is the market to be in. Vigilent sees this as the opportunity to have access to anywhere between 20% and 30% of the global market for data centers and central offices, according to Kryzan. This is also the fastest-growing market, he adds. Its growth has just started and it is important to be there at this early stage if you want to have the opportunity to become part of standard data center deployments there, he explains.

NTT has not closed any Vigilent sales outside of Japan at this point, but it has not yet tried, focusing most of its attention in this regard on its home market. While the reseller relationship started much earlier, NTT has recently scaled its effort in this regard substantially. About four months ago, Kryzan says, Vigilent trained several hundred NTT sales staff on its solution.

Commenting on NTT’s investment in Vigilent announced in October, NTT Facilities executive VP Masayuki Yokota said his employer believed in technical solutions that were not only unique but also proven. Vigilent’s was both. “Vigilent delivers measurable success through its technology again and again.”

This article first appeared in DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine. Click here for free subscription.