Just like market demand has pushed business models in the retail-colocation industry to morph from the traditional power-cooling-network play to that plus necessarily some cloud-infrastructure options, the wholesale data center market is also adjusting to a new reality where the client is a lot more savvy about their infrastructure.

Today's announcement by Digital Realty Trust is a prime example. Digital, which until today has been known to the world as its largest provider of wholesale data center space – from empty powered shells to custom suites – has hired a bunch of software developers to build its own proprietary software solution it is going to offer to its customers (and only its customers).

David Shirmacher, senior VP of portfolio operations at Digital, said EnVision is Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software Digital owns nearly all intellectual-property (IP) rights to. “Almost everything a customer will see and/or access visually is custom-coded to Digital's specifications and is retained as our exclusive IP,” he said.

The data center giant licenses several back-end functions for EnVision, but it has rights to access and modify their source code. It will own the modifications it makes.

So why has Digital, which seemed to be doing just fine with the wholesale-data-center business model it has had since its founding in 2004, decided it needs to also have a software offering? The reason is today's customer is not the customer of 2004.

Digital's customers today want to see exactly how their infrastructure works and what resources it consumes. “Our customers want and need a more comprehensive solution – a true DCIM tool that can provide increased visibility into their data center operations, which means the ability to analyze data in a manner that is digestible and actionable, a user interface with displays and reports that are tailored to data center operators, and access to historical data along with predictive capabilities.”

A problem for DCIM market incumbents

So far, the company has provided little detail about functionality of EnVision, which it plans to roll out across its massive global data center portfolio over the next 18 months. If the software is on par in terms of functionality and price with the leading DCIM tools already on the market, however, it will become a problem for the companies behind those leading tools.

A lot of the world's data center capacity is deployed within Digital's 122 properties, and the provider will give all of its customers access to a basic version of EnVision for free. This translates into a major leg up on other DCIM vendors in selling the full version of Digital's software to a huge chunk of the market.

Considering that enterprises are increasingly more prone to outsourcing data center capacity and Digital's reputation as one of the world's best companies to outsource that capacity to, market-growth prospects for DCIM vendors have just gotten somewhat weaker as well. Digital's announcement means the other vendors now have to make sure they offer products superior to EnVision if they want to sell to Digital's tenants.

How Digital EnVisions it

EnVision's feature set, according to Shirmacher, includes monitoring and analysis for mechanical and electrical infrastructure, as well as a set of basic IT asset-management functions. Like other tools on the market, it offers data analysis, reporting and dashboard capabilities, with visualizations of interaction between systems and equipment.

“EnVision's data-collection engine offers a real-time, high-speed and high-volume data-collection across multiple systems and protocols,” Shirmacher said. “There are three defined hierarchies that are designed specifically to accommodate all the systems in our data centers.”

EnVision does not control variable-frequency drives on CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) units, but it can be integrated with “any and all systems out there”, including ones that control cooling output, Shirmacher said. “We believe that a true DCIM platform should be used as a management information system accessible throughout an entire organization, and therefore we prescriptively excluded control functions of any kind to avoid any possibility of miss-operation.”

On its face, EnVision seems to have the standard feature set of DCIM tools on the market. This is a young market, however, and those standards are bound to change.

There is also at least one other data center provider with its own DCIM software: IO. Unlike Digital, the Phoenix-based provider also sells its IO.OS product as a stand-alone software solution.

Still, Digital is as close as a data center company gets to having a household name and if when it enters a new market, incumbent players cannot afford to it.

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