REVIEW OF 2023
CONTINUED
Martin Ryder , Channel sales director, Northern Europe, Vertiv 2023 has had its challenges and opportunities for the channel in the UK, Ireland and Nordics. Because of the economic climate, customers have been more careful about the projects they
is expected to grow from $1.66 billion in 2021 to $2.07 billion, a CAGR of 5.84%. Whether it was a new deployment or a site refresh, the opportunities were (and still are) there for the channel to sell not just UPS, but a multitude of associated products and services to supply power to racks (switchgear and whitespace busbar), distribute power within (rack PDUs), cool, and manage the IT assets (KVM’s and IT management solutions). And let’s not forget the rack itself! I am very confident about 2024. Intense, urgent demand for AI capabilities and its consequential impact on data centre densities and power demands will increase demand for critical infrastructure. Channel partners should look to find ways to work with vendors so they can help customers support the demand for AI and reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Legacy facilities are ill-equipped to support widespread implementation of the high- density computing required for AI, with many lacking the required infrastructure for liquid cooling. In the coming year, more and more organisations are going to realise half- measures are insufficient and opt instead for new construction – increasingly prefabricated modular solutions that shorten deployment timelines – or large-scale retrofits that fundamentally alter their power and cooling infrastructure. Such significant changes present opportunities for the channel to provide more eco-friendly technologies and practices, including liquid cooling for AI servers, applied in concert with air cooled thermal management to support the entire data centre space.
undertake, which meant many of the ‘nice to haves’ such as new laptops, cars and phones weren’t a top priority. Therefore, the challenge for channel partners was to take the opportunity to diversify and sell broader and deeper into customers with class leading products. Partners had to work with vendors that have broad portfolios of best of breed products, great reward structures and solid partner programmes. When it comes to critical infrastructure, one of the biggest concerns is power. Electric vehicle charging points, AI, IoT, our insatiable demand for data, all contribute to increasing pressure on the existing power infrastructure. Even short-term periods without power lead to major disruption in our lives, so ensuring continuity if or when the ‘lights go out’ is non-negotiable for most businesses and consumers. Because of power concerns, uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) are a crucial component of any critical infrastructure environment. The bigger the need for power, the higher the likelihood that end customers need three- phase UPS to support their critical applications. According to Omdia’s UPS Hardware Market Tracker and Analysis 2022 , there’s an increased demand for three-phase UPS in EMEA from markets outside of cloud, colocation and telco. These include retail, wholesale, healthcare, manufacturing and other industries. By 2026, the three-phase UPS market in EMEA
Martin Ryder
vertiv.com
Andrew Palmer , Enterprise Data & Cloud Solutions Group – UK channel lead, Seagate
2023 has been a more challenging year than the last, with a depressed disk drive market and profound downturn in demand, cloud inventory digestion and cautious enterprise spending amid the uncertain macroeconomic environment. Despite the challenges, we have still seen huge customer interest in the newest technologies and, in particular, high-capacity drives and self-healing and sustainable systems, which bodes well for demand in 2024.
There have been several major trends in terms of customer demand this year. We have witnessed a kind of wait-and-see mentality among many IT buyers this year, faced with the prospect of lending rate hikes that have stymied investment in new technology projects within their organisations. There has been a particularly dramatic drop in spending from public cloud providers. Elongated market correction, due to excess stock in the channel, has also led to a reduction in purchases of
Andrew Palmer
seagate.com
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