CW: Do you think CIOs, especially in Indian enterprises, give equal importance to power and cooling strategy, compared to their IT strategy?

A lot of CIOs have been building datacenters, and most are focused on purchasing the IT equipment without understanding what that IT equipment needs in the power and cooling space. So, facilities and IT are still like separate organizations. Energy should, in fact, be part of the IT strategic plan. And, when companies start doing that, it will be more than just power and cooling. While purchasing the IT equipment, they can start looking at new tools to monitor carbon emission and energy consumption of a particular project. They can change the way they run their IT organizations. Energy was never one of the metrics in the datacenters, but that is beginning to change as energy has become the biggest cost in datacenters. That's the reason we want to be the trusted advisors for IT people.

However, we now see a lot of customers bringing these two together to address this problem. In fact, at Schneider, we are trying to build a bridge between the two organizations. Our software gives a cross-functional understanding across the physical infrastructure, IT, and applications. We also ensure that the designs of new datacenter are flexible enough to address the future requirements. We are also offering our customers new services such as infrastructure management and energy management tools to understand why their energy consumption is growing. We, in fact, have tools that can monitor the energy consumption outside a datacenter, for the entire building. APC offers a lot of these tools as managed services

CW: How do you address the challenge of ever increasing capital cost of power and cooling infrastructure? While there is a clear 'capex to opex' shift when it comes to IT systems, what's the scenario when it comes to buying power and cooling solutions?

There definitely is a massive shift towards opex, and that is why we see a lot of co-location facilities. We see a lot of telcos building such facilities across the world and in India. CIOs are now looking at cost per square foot models. While for the CIOs this may mean that they don't really have to look at the energy consumption part any more, in reality, consumption has not actually reduced. Therefore, we are working with the co-located facilities to give them the visibility needed to charge back to their customers. We are working with them on aspects like modularity and scalability of datacenters. We do energy audits for them. Besides, we have leasing and funding options as well. We also have pay-per-use models for our customers. We see a lot of interest towards such opex-focused initiatives among commercial datacenters.