Evolving politics of the data centre industry may see a shift in power towards IT managers and away from the traditional incumbents, argued a panel of industry veterans at the DatacenterDynamics conference in London Tuesday.

In a panel titled "The Data Centre Efficiency Schism," three engineering experts identified how shifting priorities could bring about change.

Mike Manos, SVP of technical services at Digital Realty Trust, said facility managers may have been lulled into a false sense of security. "The industry has seen fundamental changes in the last two or three years," he said. "There's been an explosion of new technologies and it's hard for anyone to keep up."

The whole agenda has changed, warned Lex Coors, VP and director of engineering at Interxion. "The design specifications have changed," he said. "The old values, like continuous uptime, are not top of the agenda. There are new drivers, like carbon and cloud computing."

The problem for those who don't have an IT background is that they are not used to adapting to the pace of change, which makes it harder for them to convince their leadership that they are the best people to keep the data centre in line with business objectives, warned Ed Ansett, MD for EMEA at HP's Critical Facilities division.

"The biggest mistake the data centre industry made for years was overdesign," he said. Now, the industry is becoming more like the IT industry, with standardisation replacing bespoke design in data centres.