No one can be taken aback by the pace at which the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) industry has moved over the last year. Taking opportunity from the plethora of demands being placed on today’s data center operators, numerous companies are now playing in this space and this is causing consolidation in the industry, through partnerships and acquisitions. This could be viewed as a sign that the DCIM industry is finally maturing.

In October 2012 Panduit – a family owned company based in the US that launched in 1955 with a wiring duct for control panels – made its first acquisition. It purchased UK-based energy management provider Unite Technologies. The move was designed to boost Panduit’s DCIM offering, with the aim of making it one of the most “holistic” in the industry (a claim many DCIM players make).

The move brought in a slew of financial services clients (Unite’s real bread and butter) and added products focusing on power delivery, environmental management and cabinet and room security to the Panduit intelligent patching system. This system concentrates on physical infrastructure management and tracks the movement of assets and monitors activities in the data center through the network.

At the time, Andrew Caveney, Panduit’s SVP of global marketing (who also happens to be the founder Jack E Caveney Senior’s son) said Panduit was racing to keep up with an ever-evolving market. The very nature of DCIM, after all, requires it to keep in tune with each and every change the data center adopts. And in these last few years, drives towards greater efficiency and less CAPEX and new service models have pushed this change equation into overdrive.

Cash for capability
Panduit director of global solutions Jeff Paliga told FOCUS last year that Panduit would attack the market by taking its product set from intelligent patching to power and cooling. “We will look at the integrated stack and more traditional deployments where these might need to scale. We also want our software visibility to scale out,” Paliga said.

Both Paliga and Caveney admitted there was some rooky nervousness around handling an acquisition but it must have gone well because now – two years later – Panduit is doing it again, this time adding new capabilities around cooling.

And it seems its appetite for growth will not stop at its recent purchase of SynapSense, a VC-backed US company that does wireless monitoring and cooling optimization. Panduit CTO Jack Tyson says the company is still aggressively on the hunt for more companies to flesh out its DCIM roadmap to make Panduit even more competitive in the data center and enterprise space.

Tyson had just returned from a roadmap meeting with Panduit and SynapSense when FOCUS spoke with him in June. “Every time I meet up with these guys I get more excited about the acquisition. We can have a really good modularized DCIM strategy which will allow us to approach the market differently. Instead of having an overwhelming software approach that may not deliver what you want, we hope to instead deliver it with support and budgetary capacity for customers to adopt DCIM in instalments,” Tyson says.

His comments did not come as a surprise. Even during the Unite purchase Panduit was talking about its need to diversify into services and software – where the margins are growing and contract longevity allows for greater revenue stability.

“One thing I saw a few years ago as a customer of Panduit, doing the connectivity element, was that different customers are faced with trying to integrate all facets of managing a data center together,” Tyson says.

“I was with a financial firm at the time and we had to extract assets from a building we were in but had difficulty because of the insidious nature of how you deploy capacity. Services helped us. What we want to do is make it easy for our customers to take technology off the table and turn on assets easily so customers can use all the data center infrastructure they have paid for.”

Throughout our discussion, Tyson flutters in and out of conversation around what could only be described as a modular approach, mentioning terms like utility pricing and hinting at customized growth.

He assures us we will have more of an idea how Panduit hopes to progress in these areas when it makes its first roadmap announcements around SynapSense (which could be as early as July).

The smart enterprise
Panduit is keeping all R&D facilities operated by SynapSense and says it is still hiring at these facilities today in its efforts to boost DCIM innovation. And Tyson says these teams are already looking beyond the data center for infrastructure management capabilities. The history of Panduit lends itself to enterprise and manufacturing companies, and Tyson says he believes the Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine communications will eventually tie DCIM into these operations.

Former CEO and now VP of SynapSense Business Bart Tichelman says he believes the software-defined data center will be a precursor to this move. “It’s an inflection point for all of us. We already work with Cisco and VCE in this area and Panduit has already prepared pre-engineered architectures, which include VDI, optics transmission at 40GbE fiber optic plexi. We certainly believe this is the future, and it will have a huge effect on connectivity management. The utilization of the data center in a software-defined networking environment obviously sets the state for very high utilization, and once you are talking high utilization you are talking about the need to be able to manage that resource more effectively, so DCIM becomes an even more critical package,” Tichelman says. And that inevitably means there will be more gaps for Panduit to fill in future, by making more acquisitions.