How IT Solution Providers Can Increase Recurring Revenue with Remote UPS Monitoring

Currently, services make up about 30 percent of IT solution providers’ revenue, a figure that will surely grow in coming years. One of these services includes monitoring uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) to mitigate unplanned downtime. Remote UPS monitoring services are an excellent way to generate incremental revenue while substantially increasing the value you provide to customers. Every IT environment needs a power and cooling infrastructure to help prevent downtime, but proper monitoring and analytics can also result in new opportunities to work more closely with your customers.

By managing power and cooling infrastructure remotely, you gain the real-time visibility to optimize the performance of these critical systems. But there is another fundamental benefit as well. Remotely managing systems can provide you with unique insights into how to improve other parts of your client’s IT environment. This makes it possible to run customer environments more efficiently and cost-effectively, engage in strategic planning with customers, and add services that increase your value to them and provide differentiation from your competition.

Specifically, IT solution providers can leverage the insights on the physical infrastructure to start asking questions about the age of servers, storage, and other network components to determine when a piece of hardware should be upgraded or replaced. A customer may not realize a server is underperforming because it’s too old. By bringing the issue to the customer’s attention, together you can make a plan to replace it and improve performance – or prevent downtime caused by an underperforming server.

Why IT Infrastructure Visibility Matters

Visibility is essential to a well-run IT environment. It can certainly help address issues that may otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, we sometimes hear from partners about downtime situations caused by the failure to change a UPS battery. The power goes out and the UPS kicks in, but because the battery is old, it drains before power is restored. This makes customers unhappy and is preventable with remote monitoring.

Another benefit of increased visibility through monitoring is to eliminate the need to over-provision the power and cooling infrastructure. Because customers often are not aware of all the hardware that needs to be supported by backup power solutions, partners compensate for it through over-provisioning. With real-time monitoring in place, this is no longer necessary. As a result, the customer saves money by not having to pay for more capacity than what is needed.

Improved Customer Satisfaction with Remote UPS Monitoring

Real-time monitoring helps anticipate a variety of issues, allowing you, as the service provider, to minimize disruptions to your customers’ IT environments. This is a significant value-add, from the customer’s perspective, and customers often reward exemplary performance with more business opportunity.

Savvy partners use insights gained from real-time monitoring to discuss future IT investments with customers. This enables longer-term customer relationships to deepen and allows you to be more consultative and strategic. This high-value work often results in greater customer retention and satisfaction.

Remote UPS monitoring and the resulting analysis is a gateway to jointly creating an IT investment roadmap to support your customer’s business for years to come. This can include replacing aging equipment and infrastructure, and adding new services and applications that can help take a customer’s business to the next level.

Adding Incremental Revenue

When you include power and cooling in your service offerings, you create more value and differentiation for your customer while you add an incremental, ongoing revenue stream. Whether you charge for the service separately or as part of a package that also includes other services and hardware upgrades, it will have a positive impact on your customer’s overall satisfaction and your bottom line and cash flow.

Add Power and Cooling Remote Services

Remote power and cooling services are easy to add to your services portfolio. IT solution providers don’t need to add overhead or even new staff. It is a service that provides Certainty in a Connected World to your customers. Take the next step and explore our EcoStruxure IT for Partners solution that provides technology to help you seamlessly add monitoring services to your offerings. To explore ways that IT solution providers can leverage edge computing to grow their business, download our reference guide How to Capitalize on the Edge Computing Opportunity.