The legacy dividing lines between facilities and IT departments often make solutions like Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software a hard sell. While the facilities team pays the electricity bill, it is the IT team that drives electricity use. IDC, in its DCIM Marketscape 2011 report, says, “The ugly truth is that IT is much more willing to overprovision power and cooling, sacrificing efficiency to gain availability.”

We asked a few of the leading vendors in the market about their experiences with trying to sell DCIM products to companies with IT and facilities sitting in their respective silos and how they address the issue.

DatacenterDynamics FOCUS asks: Do you find that strict dividing lines between facilities and IT teams make it harder to sell a DCIM solution to a client? Why or why not?

Here’s what the vendors said:

Raritan

A sale to multiple organizations is more complex since it only takes one decision maker to stall a sale.  We anticipated that and have architected our suite for both cases – one group can make a buy decision on a product, while the two groups can jointly decide to buy our full solution. 

Power Assure

Facilities and IT teams certainly have different goals and issues; however, both teams understand a good ROI opportunity.   Regardless of which side of the house we are talking to, the key for us is to clearly show our value and illustrate the short-term and long-term ROI.

Rackwise

We do find that the traditional split between facilities and IT teams in some cases can make it more challenging to sell DCIM solutions, as the multiple teams involved evaluate potential DCIM solutions from different perspectives. However, over the past year we have seen more customer awareness of the benefits of DCIM solutions from both facilities and IT backgrounds. Especially as more companies are looking for applications to provide overall management, planning, monitoring and what-if cost savings across all aspects of the data center.

Rittal

The idea of IT managers vs. facilities managers isn’t an issue for us. We’ve seen the lines between these two areas of responsibility blur more and more in recent years. We are willing and able to “speak the language” of whichever professional we are asked to work with. Our products don’t compete with Building Management Systems (BMS) so we seldom find this to be an issue.

iTRACS

The dividing lines (between facilities and IT) result from the inability to access and democratize context-rich information. Access to critical-infrastructure data across IT, facilities and BMS, presented as meaningful, actionable information, fosters a collaborative landscape, absent the historical barriers associated with different departments and skill sets.

Sentilla

These dividing lines are what Sentilla’s product strives to blur.  By providing visibility to both sides, there can be an understanding and federated view of the data center.  Sentilla’s goal is to unify these factions.  That being said, that can be a challenge because you need to have buy-in or approval from both, or the management above.

Modius

Companies are moving toward a unified view of IT and facilities.  Decisions are now made by a committee of both groups, whereas typically, purchases were made by facilities or IT.  Sales cycles are longer due to broader requirements.