Eaton’s Linsey Miller Shares How Partners Can Grow with Power

Hello, I'm Victoria Durgen, managing editor at Channel Insider, and I'm here today with Eaton's Lindsay Miller. Thank you so much for taking some time. >> Thanks, Victoria. Nice to be with you. >> Nice to be with you. So, I guess to start, maybe just tell me a little more about what you do here at Eaton and the teams that you lead. >> Sure. Well, um, I'm really happy to be here at Eaton and I lead our global distributed IT business. So our distributed IT business does power infrastructure for all sorts of customers including data center and large enterprise and everything in between.

Great. Well, thank you so much again for the time. I'm curious as we think about the ways in which partners are embracing this new world, if you could tell me about working with a power advantage partner >> with Eaton who has embraced or grown in the AI era that we live in. Yeah. So, uh, with AI, there's a lot of changes that are coming for businesses and infrastructure and everyone's talking about it, but it brings a lot of power, demand, and a lot of opportunities to upgrade um the network and all of the systems that support it.

And and there's a use case that that keeps happening over and over with a lot of our partners. And I I'll just kind of give you one one example. So, we have an IT reseller who traditionally had sold our racks, our triplight racks, um, a lot of our connectivity products and KVMs, but had never actually, uh, offered more of our power solutions with their, uh, work that they were doing for customers. And so we had them join our power advantage program and get comfortable adding UPS power and more physical infrastructure solutions for power that AI needs.

And you know they've been successful with that. And there are examples other examples of those that have said you know I don't know how to do that or that's new to me or I don't know if I could support my customer with that. But we have a great team here at Eton that has partner enablement resources. So we have the people with the applications experience, with the product knowhow. So our partners are not doing this alone for the first time. They can do things that they never did before, but they can do that with a team of folks here at Eton that will help them be successful.

So it's a use case we continue to see and I'm I'm really excited for um the partners that are doing more and more as part of the power advantage program. >> Sure. Let's maybe dive into that program a bit more. Right. We hear a lot to your point about how AI is expanding and growing demand across the board and in sectors like the ones in which Eaton operates. So when you think about the program and what you as a company through that program can really bring to partners to support them to your point on that journey, how is the program structured to do that? >> Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean I think Eton is really well known in the industry for being loyal to our partners and our success is their success. So beyond deal registration, we offer a lot of different incentives through a tiered reward system where they can keep growing with us and they have access to SPIFFs and to MDF funds so that they can be more successful and so they can also grow and fund a lot of the other efforts that they're doing to expand in their markets.

And one of the things I love about our partners is that they are uh specialists at multiple different types of application domains and we see that as being a symbiotic system. So you know we can be experts, we can have power experts and we can have solutions for AI but they can help us um specialize that for things like government with sovereign data or with healthcare environments with all of the changes that are happening there. And so we rely upon their domain expertise. >> Sure.

I know we started kind of by talking on the programmatic aspects of what partners need enablement etc. But I don't want to lose the technology in the conversation. I know you are a technologist yourself. So when we say I think what's become a common catchall phrase AI is growing, AI demand is accelerating. When you think about what that actually means from a workload perspective, >> what is the push and the challenge on infrastructure workloads? looking like now because of AI that is different than a few years ago. >> Yeah, I mean um first and foremost um the the amount of um power that is needed for these AI workloads is um the the biggest issue um to solve for.

And so we see power densities increasing from each generation of GPU to the next. And as that happens, we need um to make more room for more GPUs, for more compute processing, and we need to compress the amount of additional resources that are needed to manage that power so that we can get the most out of every physical space that's dedicated to that. Um in addition to that, there is the challenge of heat. How can you manage the heat rejection that is needed for all of these um power- hungry workloads and the ambient environment in which it operates and cool adequately which is one of the reasons that Eton bought Void was a really comprehensive liquid cooling portfolio that complements our power infrastructure solutions.

So, um right now I'd say you know uh power and cooling definitely top of mind. uh for all of our customers and how are they going to manage that. Uh we can help them with solutions around today's workloads but also the many architecture changes that are ahead of us just in this next three-year window to do that better. So those are some areas that we've been growing our portfolio around and um really helping our customers scale with. >> Sure. when we think about things like cooling and the the power densities to your point I also hear partners talk a lot about inference the needs and inference the workload demand what are you seeing from partners and customers and how do you kind of approach that growing area as well yeah I think that's a great question because today with AI most of all all the AI processing is happening in the cloud and um there really hasn't been a kind of separation between training and inferencing thing, but over time we'll see training continue to happen in the cloud, more inferencing happening at the edge and and that goes beyond the use cases where the data has to be at the edge, you know, um because of you know maybe requirements certain data requirements and so I think what it means is that more of the kinds of uh high performance computing GPU processing that's happened in the cloud will be decentralized essentially democratized more to the edge networks. and they'll be able to handle more realtime transactions with inferencing workloads um closer to home.

But those environments really weren't set up to be like data center environments. So it will require a hybrid sort of format uh to be able to handle um GPU workloads in uh in edge environments. And and it's really a great time right now because there are more and more modular solutions um that serve the needs of edge requirements. so that customers can deploy those um much more quickly than um sort of a groundup build. >> When you think about the conversation we've had today, the trends in the industry at large, what excites you the most about what you're building with partners to ultimately benefit Eaton's customers?

For me, I think it's just the people. I think at Eaton, we have a great culture. Uh I feel really blessed to work for a company where I get to work with so many cool people and we have a great time together. we take on big challenges together but um we we really enjoy uh working together and I feel that way about the partners as well. So I think winning together between our teams and our partners' teams helping them do things they never did before um with all new daunting challenges and this uh this massive demand for power um with AI is just one of my favorite things.

I mean just an example is you know we have power advantage partners that are going from one generation of server to the next one and it's a step change in power requirements and some of them are um able to position E10 UPS products for you know backup power and reliability and uptime for the first time and they're very successful at doing it. So, I I just love seeing the teams win together and and um that's really the thing that I love the most. >> For resellers, partners who are watching this who maybe haven't explored the Power Advantage program yet, where can they go to learn more? >> So, if you go to the Eton website in the Power Advantage portal, just reach out, fill out that form, and we will have a dedicated team member contact them and help them learn about the program and get connected to all the resources. >> Okay. Thank you again for your time. >> Thank you.

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