Hey channel insiders, I'm your host Katie Bavoso and welcome to this episode of Partner POV brought to you by Eaton. In a world where nearly every business is incorporating AI into their workflows, the data center may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But this area of the tech environment is vital to a seamless adoption of AI tools, particularly in the whites space of the data center. This is why Eaton has developed a team specifically positioned to help both you and your clients understand this relationship and how to optimize it.
Here to explain the value of the Eaton Power Advantage Partner Program in the AI era is Ian Romeo, global product manager at Eaton. Welcome, Ian. >> Hi, Katie. Thanks for having me. >> Thank you so much for being here. Ian, I have to tell the audience that you just got back from an annual board game convention. So, I'll start with the most pressing question of today. How was the convention and did you find any new games to add to your collection? >> Yeah, it it was a great time.
So, did just get back from Gen Con, which happens every year in Indianapolis. They just released the number 72,000 attendees this year. So, a massive convention in downtown Indie. So, a great weekend of trying out new games. I would say the highlights really two stood out to uh to our group. So, one is called Orbit where everybody races around trying to get to planets as quickly as possible, but as you're doing that, you can rotate the planets around the board.
And then the second game uh is Tower Bricks, which is a cooperative game where everybody has a different goal in mind. So you're all trying to work together, but you can't tell everybody what your goal is, and you're trying to build a uh a structure. So both of those uh were definitely highlights of the show. >> Oh man, this is a little bit beyond me. I'm I'm still, you know, really obsessed with sequence and Carcassone myself. So these are some interesting ones.
I'm going to need a crash course from you after this recording. But I also want to point out that in addition to being a board game enthusiast yourself, you've recently started a new journey as part of Eaton's Whitespace team within the distributed IT business, which was only formed a few months ago. First of all, what is Whitespace in the data center for those who may not know, and how does this team support that specific space? >> Sure, great question.
So, within the data center, there's really two different areas. There's the gray space, which some of our commercial and industrial customers may be familiar with the eaten products that go there. Things like switch gear, panel boards, transfer switches. A lot of the large gray boxes go into the gray space. And then you have the white space, which that term came around from the white static floor panels that used to be used in the data center. And that's where all the compute technology is happening within the data center.
So eaten has products that fit into that white space. products like power distribution at the racks, the racks themselves, the products that I manage, the network infrastructure part of the portfolio. And we saw it as a huge opportunity for us with all of the new upgrades to servers and storage systems that customers are rolling out. We wanted to have a targeted team that could go and really help our partners and our customers understand what Eaton has and help develop that full portfolio package to go after uh the emerging white space. >> Very well put.
Well, let's put this into a modern context because we got to talk about artificial intelligence at a time when AI has become the technology of the moment. Truly, everyone is incorporating it into their business processes. Why does the whites space matter so much? >> So when we talk about AI or anything with high performance compute, it all starts with the switch or the server. So everybody's looking at those new switch and server technologies. And then that determines what's your power factor, what type of cooling do you need, what type of rack or network infrastructure do you need to house those servers and transmit all that data.
And so when customers are building out and designing data centers, it's going to start with the switch. It's going to go back to the utility, make sure they have everything they need that can power the facility and then comes back to that compute space. So that's why the white space is so important is sort of the start and end of those data center installs. So again, we we wanted to make sure as all these new emerging technologies are coming out, we've got a team built that can work with different companies developing switches and servers to understand their needs so we can better inform our customers as they're rolling out some of these new high performance compute technologies. >> How is the Eden Whitespace team positioned to best help channel partners, especially when it comes to identifying new business opportunities in their customers data centers?
I think one of the great things about the Whitespace team is it's not just product managers. We also have business development managers and folks looking after some of those emerging technologies and then leveraging our alliance partnership. So we have alliances with a lot of different companies out there. We just recently announced an alliance with Nvidia. And so as Nvidia is developing new server technology, new switch technology, we're going to be partnering with them to understand the needs.
And then in turn, we can go and help our channel partners understand, okay, if somebody is using this type of switch, here are the different products from Eaton that you would need to help support that. So it's everything like I mentioned from the power distribution to the racks to the network infrastructure. we can help identify what products fit best with the different compute solutions our customers are having. And then if anybody ever has issues, we also offer as part of our power advantage program sitewalks.
So as somebody is developing or upgrading a new data center or an existing data center, they can have one of our partner development specialists come out, do a sitewalk with them, evaluate the equipment on hand today and what they may need for the future. So, we're really trying to position ourselves as that solution expert and again just another partner for our channel partners, right? Really being able to to go out there and help people in the field understand what solutions eaten has for them. >> And can you share a real world success story in which your team helped a partner optimize their clients whites space? >> Two examples come to mind.
One is pretty recent. So, we partnered with a large financial institution. They were rolling out new servers and they needed higher powered PDUs. And so we actually got together, the Whitespace team, partnered with our global project managers, engineering, supply chain to figure out how could we design a customized PDU for this this customer. We developed it in record time for our our PDU portfolio. And we actually started shipping last month the the first additional unit.
So we took a large development timeline. we were able to condense it because of some of these new AI technologies, things that are moving at faster speeds and the customers need us to manufacture and design at quicker speeds as well. So, that was a huge success story for us. Again, we just rolled out those initial builds and so we're excited to see this relationship continue um into the the coming years as well. Another instance where our team partnered with a customer, we had a major company um national company who was upgrading their racks.
And so our partner specialists, they asked them, well, if you're upgrading the racks for the servers, what are you doing for fiber connectivity? And so they actually reached out, got me involved. We started talking about some of the different servers that they would be using, some of the different fiber technologies that they may need. And just by pulling the team together into the conversation, pulling together the racks, the connectivity, we were able to lock in that spec and we're going to be able to help with fiber roll out in addition to all of the rack infrastructure and then some of the power infrastructure for that uh national roll out as well.
So, two exciting opportunities and again it's just working with our partners to show them here's the entire product assortment that Eaton has that can help with any of your customers installations. >> Well, speaking of partners, Ian, where can interested IT resellers and MSPs go to learn more about Eaton's Whitespace solutions and join the program? >> Best place to go is power advantage. There you'll find out all about our program benefits and it has sign up links as well as some of our different resource materials on new products, training materials, and other ways that Eden can partner with you. >> Amazing.
Well, Ian, thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to following your progress with the Whitespace team through the rest of the year and beyond. >> Thanks, Katie. And again, it was a pleasure speaking with you this morning. >> Well, thank you so much, Ian, and thank you at home for joining us. To see more episodes of Partner POV, you can head on over to channelinsider.com. Once again, I'm Katie Bavoso and I'll see you next time.
This transcript was generated automatically from the
video's captions and may contain errors.
