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Emerson Network Power(India), a business of Emerson, has an expansive portfolio of intelligent, rapidly deployable hardware and software solutions for power management. In an exclusive interview with Electrical India, Manish Sawant, Director (Power Products Management), from the company talks to P. K. Chatterjee on challenges in today’s business environment and their smart solutions. Excerpts...

  • How important is it to supply continuous power to our business establishments?

The recent announcements and policy bolsters from the government have led to a rise in the number of start-ups and businesses coming up in the country. This has also led to increasing demand for 24×7 power supply. Each industry today has at least some part of its business dependent on continuous power, e.g., datacentres or computing. Any down time on business processes / services etc., will not only result in loss of revenues in the longer run, but also loss of customers and brand recall.

Identifying these business processes and services and guarding them with surge protection devices is something that all CTOs will be looking at eventually. In light of the above, we will see a lot of businesses and organisations considering solutions like surge protection devices, industrial inverters and UPS solutions – and other power management products to safeguard their IT infrastructure and thereby help their businesses function unhindered 24×7.

  • What’re the major (power) challenges posing risks to modern business environment?

The modern business environment today faces some important power related challenges. The most important challenge out of them is an unreliable power grid, which is mostly rid with large snags and surges. The second most important challenge is that a majority of the businesses, which are located in Tier 1 and Tier 2 areas, seem to be affected by poor energy supply. Businesses are always looking for 24×7 clean power, which helps them function efficiently and smoothly, thereby resulting in servicing their customers better. Therefore, companies across sectors will now be looking at directing most of their operational investments towards creating a robust and agile back up power infrastructure for 24×7 business continuity.

Perhaps the biggest challenge dominating this area is the lack of awareness of basic power quality fundamentals for technologies powered by green initiatives including solar power. Often, users expect a UPS to automatically solve all power-related problems. Even after a UPS is installed, power problems can continue to occur as the root causes are often faulty earthing and grounding systems. Usage of poor quality batteries – and cheap power systems from unorganised market makes high power systems unreliable. Regular power quality audits and monitoring can prevent unplanned downtime, and make UPS and other systems work efficiently. Additionally, a lot of businesses now want to consider upping the ante on the purchase of cleaner and greener power sources – as their stakeholders place an ask on reducing the carbon footprint.

  • Is it necessary to measure power consumption at all points?

With energy costs on the rise, majority of businesses are looking at curtailing their operational costs with the aim of improving business performance – and this is one of the primary reasons most businesses look at measuring the effectiveness of their power consumption.

For example, the average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating for datacentres is <1.8. Running today’s datacentres with this speed has become of utmost importance to the businesses today – as this results in the datacentre running ultra-efficiently, and also helps good energy improvement and improvement in energy usage as compared to an average PUE, which is often 2.0 or higher.

  • Can profitability be enhanced through data analysis and good practices?

Power consumption management is directly related to controlling over head expenses for any organisation. This in turn directly reflects in the gross margins, and hence can impact the profitability of a firm to a great extent. Many companies today follow the standard practices of measuring, monitoring and controlling the consumption.

Apart from that, with fine-grained real-time energy monitoring and control, businesses can also evolve datacentre designs to maximise their efficiency. Energy usage reports, which are complete with all data, are also important from the point of view of focusing attention on the major consumers, and real-time alerts can be introduced to automatically flag any behaviours that raise concerns based on the organisation’s energy policies and guidelines. Alerts can also automatically trigger corrective actions, such as power capping, which ensures that operations stay within predefined thresholds.

  • What’s Emerson’s contribution to keep the business environment healthy?

With regards to keeping a healthy business environment, Emerson Network Power has consistently been developing and researching on new technologies & solutions – in the midst of extreme competition to keep up with the pace. We want to be perceived as a one-stop solution provider for business houses to protect and optimise their critical infrastructure. Our products and solutions – be it UPS systems, smart solutions and surge protection devices – are developed considering business criticality, low TCO, reliability and flexibility of adoption. In terms of our strategy, we are always focused on creating customer-centric solutions that help our customers with business solutions compared to single product offering.

We realise that our customers are always on the lookout for options that are hassle free and dependable. Emerson has a clear and dedicated vision towards maintaining its equity amongst partners and customers as their preferred vendor, providing quality products and solutions that are cost efficient and tailor-made for their specific needs.

We design and manufacture solar inverters for the residential market as well as for and small businesses. These small-light weight and efficient solar inverters facilitate time-saving installation and helps reduce reliance on costly as well as non-renewable fossil fuel sources with their great power density – and the ability to pass on excess power back to the grid. Emerson also produces solar inverters (Energy Export Unit –EEU) & (Energy Storage Unit –ESU) and its monitoring equipment. We have also made substantial progress in working closely with the Indian government.

  • What are your latest technological upgrades for the Indian businesses?

We are the leader in the AC Power Business, which manufactures UPS ranging from 600VA to 3.3MVA. Some of our products have gained immense customer trust over the years. Our products offer best-in-class efficiency to the tune of 96.7%, which is the best in the industry. Most of our products are designed keeping in mind the latest modular and monolithic designs that are compact and user-friendly.

In keeping with our technology upgrades, we also provide smart solutions for our data centres. For example, a lot of SMEs are generating large amounts of data, but they are working with limited IT infrastructure (say) with two to three servers. They do not have the capacity to invest in huge datacentres on account of space constraints. They are always on the lookout for smart solutions that can help them save and manage data without having to build new datacentre space. This approach, helps them increase their datacentre capacity, improve IT control and business efficiency without having to build a new datacentre, which would involve the company incurring huge costs.

Our well known solutions have enabled many companies with solutions such as – smart rows, smart aisles and smart mods, which are mini data centres in racks with various facilities.

  • How is the result?

Our customers save on space, operate efficiently, and gain access to latest technology with upgrades that can be done – as and how the business situation demands. Products from Emerson Network Power’s smart solution portfolio would work as they would be made up of precision cooling, UPSs, power management, monitoring, control technologies, and fire suppression – all in one enclosed system that is advantageous as businesses look for cost efficient and easy to maintain solutions.
All of these, as well as the need for modular solutions, which are less complex where the IT infrastructure is viewed as one rather than piecemeal – are major reasons that have today spearheaded the demand for smart solutions.

  • What’re the new technologies in the field of emergency power supply?

In view of keeping up with the demands of businesses, companies are constantly researching on and developing new technologies & products that will help increase business efficiency & performance.

Some of the new technologies that will make its way to the market and a great impact in the future are: i) battery- less technologies for very short back up (10 to 15 seconds) and ii) lithium ion batteries-for back up beyond 15 seconds.

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