The managed services provider’s (MSP) primary mission is to prevent downtime for the customer. With that in mind, you’ll want to monitor and manage as many of your customers’ systems as possible. APC by Schneider Electric is now making it even easier to add to your offerings through EcoStruxure™ IT for Partners.
In addition to workstations, laptops, servers, storage, and networking gear, you also can monitor power supplies and environmental conditions in your customers’ distributed IT infrastructure. This allows you to add value and makes it easier to deliver on the availability commitments you make to your customers.
This is especially true in an edge computing environment, where customers could have hundreds or thousands of unstaffed remote sites that are critical to business operations. Without reliable power, the infrastructure cannot run. And once you explain the necessity of managed power and cooling to your clients in these terms, it’s doubtful they would fail to see how important this piece of IT management is.
Top Reasons to Add Managed Power and Cooling Services
Here are five compelling reasons to add managed power and cooling to your managed services portfolio:
- Maximizing Availability
The power and cooling environment is the one common thread across the entire IT environment. Managing power and cooling, in addition to the IT systems, ensures that both function at optimal levels, which is critical to maximizing system availability. Ensuring this availability at edge computing sites, which may not have on-site staff, is particularly becoming more critical.
- Easy Integration with Monitoring Tools
We’ve integrated many of our Smart-UPS and other connected devices to the most popular RMM (remote monitoring and management) and PSA (professional services automation) platforms to make it easier to start offering the service to customers with more product and platform integrations happening all the time. Additionally, EcoStruxure IT for Partners – the world’s first partner-specific cloud-based DCIM – features a multi-tenant, vendor-neutral view and mass configuration capabilities to remotely monitor and manage your customer’s IT infrastructure in the cloud and at the edge.
- SLA Compliance
In your managed services SLA (service level agreement) with customers, you commit to certain levels of availability, so as a result, customers expect the physical infrastructure to run uninterrupted. To avoid downtime – and unhappy customers – you should manage both the power and environmental conditions. Managed PDUs help ensure optimal temperature and humidity to prevent device damage caused by environmental conditions, and instead extend their lifecycles. EcoStruxure IT for Partners even gives you actionable, data-driven insights based on industry benchmarks and best practices that extend the life of the equipment and ensure uptime. This makes it easier for you to achieve SLA compliance.
- Device Lifecycle Management
Next to human error, an unmanaged UPS is one of the main causes of downtime because eventually the battery needs to be replaced. Remote monitoring allows you to monitor battery health proactively and avoid replacing batteries in an emergency because your customer’s IT stack went down. Scheduled maintenance is always better than emergency maintenance.
- Natural Service Extension
You probably already sell power and cooling anyway, so turning it into a managed service makes sense. In addition to your margin on the sale, you now also have an opportunity for recurring revenue. It’s a natural extension of the services you already deliver; so why wouldn’t you do it? Plus, it’s just the right thing to do for your customer.
Access Power and Cooling Managed Services Resources
MSPs are in a strategic market position to add power and cooling managed services to their portfolio particularly with the dramatic uptick of edge computing deployments. Learn more about this opportunity by viewing this video on how power and cooling managed services bring value to your business and your customers.
Ready to get started on this opportunity? Access resources today with EcoStruxure IT for Partners to ramp up your visibility and oversight of your customers IT infrastructure.
Originally published June 9, 2016, updated May 9, 2019.
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