Four EcoStruxture IT Assessments to Help Partners Spark Customer Conversations

Any opportunity to have a conversation with a customer can lead directly to new sales with them, and APC by Schneider Electric EcoStruxure™ IT Assessments are a great tool for helping you start conversations. Running an assessment on your customers’ IT gives you the actionable intelligence you need to enable meaningful discussions with your customers about the best way to optimize their entire environment and address their specific business problems.

EcoStruxure IT now gives partners full visibility into their customer’s distributed physical infrastructure environment. APC has also partnered with CloudPhysics to provide 3 additional virtual IT assessments through December 31st to expand our partner’s reach with their customers. These include:

• Virtual Infrastructure Health Assessment
• vSphere Readiness Assessment
• Hybrid Cloud Readiness Assessment
• Physical infrastructure Health Assessment

EcoStruxure IT Gateway makes assessments a snap
Assessments have gotten much easier to conduct with the recent announcement of our EcoStruxure IT Gateway. The Gateway is a simple downloadable piece of software that collects data on all data center infrastructure and sends it to the cloud-based Schneider Electric Data Lake, where it is analyzed along with (anonymized) data from many other customers.

It takes just minutes for a customer to download the Gateway, and only a few minutes more to run an assessment. The value for both the customer and partner is immediate.

Virtual Infrastructure Health Assessment
The Virtual Infrastructure Assessment examines configurations and compatibilities to identify opportunities for efficiency. It may find a customer can improve space efficiency by eliminating unneeded snapshots and VMs, and identify assets that are obsolete or need updating. It also benchmarks the customer’s implementation against others using EcoStruxure IT, to help predict potential problems and opportunities for improvement.

vSphere Readiness Assessment
The vSphere Readiness Assessment is intended to help companies prepare for an upgrade to the latest VMware hypervisor. VMware will end support for vSphere 5.5 this month (Sept. 2018). But our Data Lake, with data on more than 13,000 organizations, shows over half of VMware customers still run vSphere 5.5 or earlier. The vSphere Assessment will show any hardware compatibility issues with an upgrade, an overview of licenses allotted vs. those in use, the cost of upgrading to an optimized state, and which loads may be better suited for the cloud.

Hybrid Cloud Readiness Assessment
For those who are thinking about the cloud, our Hybrid Cloud Assessment will give you the data to compare the cost & advantages of migrating your customer’s IT to various cloud providers vs. remaining on premises. It will also help you right-size their virtual machine memory and storage footprint before moving to the cloud, so customers only pay for what they use. By the same token, it can help them optimize workloads that remain on premises.

Physical Infrastructure Health Assessment
The Physical Infrastructure Assessment looks at things like UPS and battery life, PDUs, and cooling systems. This will provide data about any batteries that need to be replaced, UPSs that are no longer supported or are eligible for extended warranties. You’ll also be able to tell whether a UPS battery is in an area that’s too hot or cold, thus potentially reducing its lifespan. It will also show the age of each PDU in the environment and whether any are overloaded, or close to it.
Once an assessment is run, you will receive an easy-to-read, personalized data report that looks like this. The report lays out key metrics and insights from the assessment and acts as a great tool to help explain what’s happening in your customer’s environment in a straightforward manner.

How assessments spark conversations
All of this data is intended to spark conversations with customers about potential changes, upgrades and maintenance. Let’s face it, most customers don’t spend much time thinking about their UPSs, but if you can demonstrate that a UPS has been operating in temperatures 10°F above normal, thereby potentially cutting its runtime in half, now you’ve got something to talk about. And many of these upgrades will naturally involve new IT gear and supporting infrastructure, which you’ll be in position to sell.

At the same time, many assessments can save customers real money, such as if you can show them how to optimize storage with thin disk provisioning, or that they’ve got hundreds of VMs powered off but still consuming TB of disk space. Watch this video to learn more about running assessments and how to use them to identify opportunities with your customers.

One more thing: for every assessment you run, you get an entry into the Gateway to Getaway contest – and the potential to win an all-expenses paid vacation!

Click here to learn more about the EcoStruxure IT Gateway – and how to get those conversations started.