There are market observers predicting doom and gloom for 2013, but that is not a reflection of what is actually taking place in the market, according to Eaton Industries power quality marketing manager, Michael Mallia.
He claims businesses are still willing to invest into new technology, whether it is the IT equipment itself or renewing the infrastructure that supports it, to improve business efficiency.
For that reason, Mallia expects the power management space in 2013 to retain its momentum from last year.
“It will be more of the same and we don’t foresee anything too significant taking place,” he said.
However, the one thing Mallia did observe in 2012 was the growth in privatisation of energy efficiency, which in turn is affecting the decision related to buying of equipment.
“Business may decide to consolidate facilities, and that will become more prominent this year,” he said.
“As energy costs will keep going up, there will be more focus on energy efficiency.”
The privatisation of energy efficiency has already been a key topic of discussion in the high end enterprise and datacentre space for a long time, but only last year did SMBs start to understand and do things about it.
“Looking at what we sell, we’re seeing a big shift towards more premium type of products,” Mallia said.
By this, businesses have shown a willingness to spend more to make sure their infrastructure is a bit more efficient.
Mallia is unable to tell if it was the Carbon Tax last year that made people more aware about power efficiency, but admits that the past SMBs “knew they could do things to save energy but would not really focus on it.”
“The IT guy didn’t really care about the cost of energy, but now they do,” he said.
Advanced virtualisation
Eaton has found itself participating more in the virtualisation industry, and Mallia said this is due to the connection between power infrastructure and virtualisation.
While large organisations are often at the forefront of wanting to improve the resilience and efficiency of their infrastructure, a key change Mallia observed last year was people in the SMB space not only adopting virtualisation a lot higher, but also becoming advanced users.
For example, SMBs are now beginning to seriously look at how they can initiate a live migration of virtual machines to another facility in the event of a black out or power problem.
"The level of deployment and utilisation of those features really surprised me last year,” Mallia said.
“Companies are starting to take advantage of the advanced features of virtualisation platforms, and hooking that up with the infrastructure to get a combined benefit of increased reliability and reduced infrastructure cost.”
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.