"It’s a spaghetti mess in the LAN room"

Leanne Cunnold, general manager, Asia (South), APC, talks to PRASHANT L RAO about power conditioning requirements across Asia, APC’s attempts to make power infrastructure more reliable and quicker to fix, and the modularisation of power and cooling infrastructure

* Power conditioning requirements vary dramatically across Asia. For instance, most Indian cities have unreliable power, and outages are quite common. Japan on the other hand boasts of a first-world infrastructure. Does APC sell different models across Asia depending upon each country’s unique power situation?

We’ve found that customer needs are similar in most countries. Japanese enterprise customers and Indian ones both want high availability when it comes to power protection. There are more power outages in India and therefore Indian customers need longer runtime. The [APC UPS] product remains the same irrespective of whether it is for Japan or India. The main difference is the presence of additional battery packs for longer runtime in India.

* To what extent does APC tailor its products for emerging markets?

For India, our UPS products require a higher voltage range. Countries such as Australia also benefit from a wider range. The Back-UPS 800 and 1500 are examples of such products. The ES 500 that debuted in India has been rolled out in Russia as well. In Australia users need 10-30 minutes of backup, in India that’s 45 minutes for an SME or commercial establishment. This is largely because the Indian SME runs his printer off the UPS.

* How many UPS’ does APC export from India every year and where are they sold?

We have 14 manufacturing facilities globally. The units are exported to USA, Africa and Asia, including Japan. In India we manufacture the Back-UPS and SmartUPS models, battery packs and network management cards. MAIT estimates value our exports at Rs 502 crore. We manufacture different models in diverse parts of the globe. For instance, the ISX range comes out of the Philippines.

* PC sales are slated to hit three million. What’s the attach rate and do you expect it to improve?

In India, the attach rate for branded PCs is as high as 50 percent. In Australia it’s just five percent. In the service space, UPS attach rates are a lot higher.

* Is the enterprise UPS market bigger than the consumer or SOHO market?

The enterprise UPS market is the bigger one in revenue terms. It is also growing faster, driven by trends such as server consolidation and more SANs getting deployed. More servers are becoming rack mounted and there’s a lot of server consolidation taking place in the APAC.

This year the focus will be on InfraStruXure. Cooling is the latest addition to our product portfolio. APC is the only one with modular UPS, cooling and integrated racks. Our rivals have rack-UPS systems but they follow a more componentised approach.

We are working on improving reliability by increasing product reliability, decreasing the mean time taken to repair a UPS (if a component fails half as often, your power infrastructure becomes twice as reliable). APC has made a modular system that can be repaired 10x faster by hot swapping [the defective component]. The other area of improvement is to reduce downtime resulting from human error. In today’s IT environment, equipment changes every three to five years. The LAN room, however, changes every decade. The upshot of all this is that you end up with a spaghetti mess in the LAN room.

* With almost every computer peripheral going portable—printers, scanners and what have you—does APC sell a portable UPS?

We offer a travel power case for your notebook. This is a laptop bag with a battery and one charger that replaces the three you would normally have to carry in order to charge your PDA, notebook and mobile phone. The business traveller just plugs in the power pack at an airport while it’s in the bag and lets it charge.