Vertiv is expanding its Edge technologies and services, and resources for its channel partners to meet growing demand from all major industries.
Edge computing is becoming central to organisations’ IT infrastructure.
The Edge (computing that is near the user at the Edge of a network, in places including small, prefabricated data centres, or via hardware such as gateway nodes) is one of the fastest-growing markets in corporate IT.
It is being used for tasks ranging from gaming and video analytics, to manufacturing and stock trading.
Global spending on Edge infrastructure will grow by an average of 18.5% per year between 2019 and 2025, with the market worth $41.7 billion in 2025, according to a forecast by IDC, a research company.
The Edge market in IT infrastructure, its future, and what it means for the channel, was discussed at the recent Vertiv Annual Channel Summit and Awards. The digital event, held on 17 November, also included awards for the channel, a virtual expo showing Vertiv’s latest technologies, and its resources and support for channel partners.
In a session titled, ‘A Winning Formula with Edge Solutions’, Birgit Jackson, Director, Integrated Racks and IT Solutions, EMEA, at Vertiv, discussed what IT customers are spending on, challenges in the critical IT infrastructure industry, and how Vertiv can help solve them.
A Growing Market
Birgit said that Edge technology was increasing in all major industries, especially in retail and industrial.
“Retailers are competing to provide seamless consumer experience which is increasingly mobile,” she said. “Online retailers use the Edge to expand their physical presence with Edge locations and [use Edge technologies] to increase availability and minimise delivery times.”
In manufacturing, an increasing number of companies are digitising their operations, and their planning and supply chains, Birgit added.
When using Edge technologies, customers face three main challenges – scale, speed and complexity, Birgit said. For example, a multinational retailer modernising its IT capability across a fleet of thousands of stores and hundreds of distribution centres in dozens of countries, under time pressure and budget constraints, she added.
Vertiv, with its technological breadth, geographic coverage and manufacturing footprint, can reduce the complexity of rolling out the Edge across thousands of sites, she said.
Vertiv’s Expanding Edge
Vertiv provides power, thermal management and IT management products and services for the Edge market.
In October, Vertiv published a report on the Edge that outlined four Edge “archetypes” for how the technology is used in IT infrastructure.
These uses include “smart devices” in vehicles and streetlamps, and in a warehouse or office within a distributed Edge data centre.
Vertiv provides Edge technology and support for rack systems, UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), PDUs, cooling, IT systems and software, services and solutions. Stay tuned for a new addition release to the Edge next year!
Curious to see our products in action? Try the Vertiv XR augmented reality app and bring them to life (available on Google Play and Apple store).
These and other Edge products and services are sold through Vertiv channel partners. If you are already part of the Vertiv Partner Program, you will get extensive sales and marketing support, including our configuration tool, for tailoring prices and quotes of our products and services to your needs. Not a partner yet? Sign up now!
Enhanced Partner Support
Over the next year, Vertiv will release two additional resources for its partners. These include a marketing centre within the Partner Portal − with co-branded web content, emails and other marketing resources − and a “virtual showroom”, enabling our partners to have meetings with customers and demonstrate Vertiv power, cooling, monitoring and data centre infrastructure technologies and services through a virtual space.
Remote access to IT infrastructure is becoming a key selling point in critical IT infrastructure.
More Vertiv customers are moving their IT to the cloud. In response to a surge in home working during the pandemic, they are demanding IT infrastructure that can be accessed (and fixed) remotely.
“There is a vast amount of changing market dynamics within IT management and customer needs,” said Birgit. “There is increased remote work and focus on automation. Customers are moving very rapidly to the cloud. Lack of access to remote sites result in time-consuming manual work.”
The Vertiv™ Avocent® ADX Ecosystem helps organisations manage their IT infrastructure (including remotely) and install new infrastructure quicker, while improving IT security.
In a presentation at the same session, Murray Irvine, Senior Director, Data Centre Compute and Solutions Sales, Middle East, Russia, Africa and Turkey, at Dell Technologies, said that companies’ growing demand for data and IT infrastructure is fuelling demand for Edge technologies.
“The Edge is a series of locations where your customer generates the core value of their business,” he said. “If [your customer is] in manufacturing, it will be the manufacturing plant…for a retailer, [it will be the] sales floor or the digital online application.”
According to Gartner, 75% of enterprise data will be processed outside of traditional data centres or the cloud by 2025 and in the Edge. In 2018, the proportion of enterprise data processed in the cloud was around 10%, according to Gartner.
Research company IDC has also forecast that by 2025 there will be 55.7 billion Internet-connected devices worldwide, and 75% of those will be connected to an Internet of Things (IoT) platform.
The explosion of data created by machines and people, and demand for instant analysis of that data, plus technologies including artificial intelligence, 5G and IoT, are increasing demand for the Edge, said Murray.
For channel partners, the potential for value creation and growth in the Edge market is enormous, he said.
“[The Edge] is challenging CIOs to rethink the role of the data centre.”
It will also change the way organisations run their IT infrastructure. Vertiv, with the help of its channel partners, is committed to making Edge technologies ever more central to our customers’ needs.
Watch the full session on demand.
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