PERSPECTIVES - Distributor viewpoint

Declining PC prices make the UPS appear a luxury item - which means harder work for distributors.

Like dealers, distributors tend to be reactive when it comes to UPS harder work for distributors. sales. Few consider the market worth selling to - it seems too much like hard work. Peter Rigby, marketing director at CHS, says: 'We deal with two or three UPS vendors. I'd say it's not so much a growing market as an add-on sale.'

Steve Lockie, general manager of the networking division at Computer 2000, has a slightly different view. He thinks the UPS market is under-exploited, due to it being so hard to tap into: 'The market continues to grow, but if you look at the attach rate it is remarkably low. We ship thousands and thousands of PCs every month, but maybe only 1,000 UPSs.'

C2000 has tried to improve the attach rate, says Lockie, but it was difficult two years ago and has become even harder since then. 'The key problem used to be sizing and matching the right UPS to the product. But price changes have further complicated matters.'

A few years ago, the UPS cost just a few hundred pounds and the PC a couple of thousand, making the UPS a relatively inexpensive item that would protect the PC or server. But prices have since fallen dramatically on and underneath the desktop. Although the UPS has also come down in price, it looks more like an expensive extra. And, of course, the margins have been squeezed.

Jon Atherton, general manager at Enta Technologies, says the distributor tends to be reactive when it comes to UPS sales because prices have fallen and there is no margin left. 'The cost has come down so much and the pull-through is all for one vendor,' he says.

That vendor is APC, whose range is stocked by 14 distributors in the UK - so fulfilling demand for APC product is not hard and pricing on the brand is competitive within the distribution sector.

Enta sells about 300 units in a month, says Atherton. This might make more than #50,000 of sales per month, which is worth having, but it is low-margin business for distributors. The challenge they face is getting resellers - and users - excited about UPSs.

'The biggest problem is convincing the customer that it's a worthwhile investment,' says Rigby. 'We try to encourage dealers to sell the UPS, but passing that down the food chain is pretty hard. Unless you can convince them of the value in terms of the potential loss, the user sees it as an unnecessary additional cost.'

According to Kevin Bulcock, product manager for networking and communications products at Ideal Hardware, the trick is to sell the idea of power management, not just the UPS.

'We do everything we can to maximise the opportunity - site surveys, power management, remote maintenance and monitoring,' says Bulcock. 'Areas such as maintenance, warranty and support need to be looked at. At the heart of all this is a battery and you need to know it's going to work.'

This is an approach that vendors encourage, but it's still difficult to persuade conventional resellers to carry the UPS flag into customer sites. Bulcock believes this is perhaps understandable:

'Historically, power management was part of site services and not IT. If you had a site or facilities manager, power was seen as part of their area, so IT resellers have never seen it as part of their remit,' he says.

Bulcock thinks this is changing, though, as facilities management companies and site managers become more aware of the needs and potential uses of IT within the business.

He also thinks part of the difficulty of getting resellers interested in UPSs has been caused by the vendors - and by one vendor in particular driving availability up and prices down to maximise volumes in a pull-driven environment.

'The average reseller is probably looking at an APC-type product. Where you have anyone with that much of the market, it is not good for the market in general,' Bulcock says. 'At the same time, selling 400 1KVa units a day does not turn me on - there's nothing I can add to it, it is just a commodity.'

THE KEY PLAYERS

BEST POWER

Commanding approximately four per cent of the European UPS market, Best Power is also among the most successful of the world's 80 or so UPS manufacturing companies.

The vendor has recently launched a line of UPSs with three-year warranties, to boost its presence in the channel and increase its profile in the market. The Patriot range is aimed at the PC/workstation market with packages for the 250Va to 400Va power bracket, while the larger Fortress series has been designed to meet the needs of both single and multiple servers.

The latter also features BestLink power management technology to enable complete control over multiple servers and operating systems over the Web.

DOWN AND OUT - POWER EVENTS

According to a study carried out by IBM, the average desktop PC is hit by more than 120 power disturbances each month. Some, which are over in milliseconds, are fairly transient and have little or no perceptible effects.

Others are much more damaging and can cause extensive loss of data - which means costly repairs.

Power events come in many different guises but fall mostly into the following categories:

Sags: A sag, otherwise known as a brownout, is a short-term decrease in voltage to the mains supply from the supplying utility. Sags are usually caused by the power demands of electrical devices as they start up - they need a surge of power to break the inertia. These include motors, compressors, lifts and shop tools.

As well as shortening the lifespan of the offending electrical equipment, a serious sag will starve a computer of the voltage it needs to function.

Sags manifest themselves by causing keyboards to lock or systems to crash unexpectedly, both of which can result in lost or corrupted data.

Some power companies use sags deliberately if a particular strain is placed on the power grid. To cope with demand, the utility companies use these 'rolling brownouts' to systematically reduce voltage levels in certain high-demand areas for hours or even days at a time, particularly during the summer months when air-conditioning systems are in constant use. The sag is the most common form of power event and the cause of about 87 per cent of all power disturbances, according to a recent study by Bell Labs.

Blackouts: A blackout is a total loss of utility power which may be caused by excessive demands on the power grid or power line failure, as a result of anything from adverse weather conditions to car accidents (this has been known to happen from time to time). The result is that all the work the computer is currently storing in Ram or cache memory is lost. The hard drive's file allocation table may also fall victim to the outage, resulting in the loss of all the data stored on the drive.

Spikes: Perhaps the most familiar of all the power events, a spike is a sudden and dramatic increase in voltage, not unlike a tidal wave of electric current. A spike is typically the result of a local lightning strike, but can be caused by the grid coming back online after a period of downtime. It can enter a company's supply via a number of routes, cause serious damage to hardware and network connections and even destroy components completely.

Surges: A power surge is a short-lived increase in voltage, usually lasting no longer than 1/120 of a second. Almost the opposite of a sag, a surge is usually the result of several high-powered pieces of electrical machinery being turned off simultaneously or over a short period of time.

The sudden decrease in demand for power causes the extra voltage to be dissipated through the power line affecting the surge. Any surge falling outside the expected peak voltage level will place a strain on components and may cause premature failure of electrical equipment.

Noise: Otherwise known as electro-magnetic interference and radio frequency interference, noise can seriously disrupt the smooth sine waves (the form in which the electricity travels) coming from the power supplier into a building. There are many potential causes, particularly lightning, nearby radio transmitters and industrial equipment, and noise can cause strange and inexplicable glitches and/or errors to appear in executable programs and data files.

THE KEY PLAYERS

CHLORIDE

Formed in 1891, Chloride has become the only UK company in Europe's top three UPS manufacturers, priding itself in particular on the quality of its systems and after sales support package.

Although it focuses predominantly on the mid-range of the UPS market, Chloride has one of the broadest product ranges in the industry and, with packages rating from 250KVa up to 3,000KVa, it has experienced the strongest growth of any company in this sector in recent years.

With its PowerStart, PowerStation, PowerLan, PowerRack and Synthesis models, Chloride claims it can accommodate the power protection requirements of the home PC user up to the largest manufacturing and commercial enterprises.

THE KEY PLAYERS

EXIDE

Exide is a member of the BTR Siebe Group of companies and holds an estimated eight per cent of the European UPS market. It also has about 15 per cent of the UK - one of its largest EMEA markets - and the company expects the region's revenue to grow significantly during the next 12 months.

Exide's line interactive and online topology products range from 300Va for PC and workstation systems, up to more than 1,000KVa for multiple server and data centre applications. The Powerware Prestige online UPS represents the company's largest and most profitable product family. Exide claims that through this and its other high-quality technologies, plus superior levels of service and support, it can continue to improve its position in the global UPS market.

SELECTING AND SIZING A UPS

When a dealer pitches a UPS at a corporate, it is essential to determine a number of factors. The dealer must decide exactly what needs to be protected and to what extent, how much battery backup time is required to allow the organisation to shut down properly if this becomes necessary and the size of the load that needs to be protected. To establish the latter, the size of the required KVa must be calculated.

KVa stands for thousands (K) of volt-amperes (Va). The output of a UPS is measured in volt-amperes or VA (output voltage x output current). KVa refers to kilo-volt-amperes or VA x 1,000. UPSs, particularly modular ones, come in KVa 'blocks', depending on the size required.

In selecting UPS systems for corporates, resellers must:

1: List all the equipment that must be protected.

2: Determine the VA rating. This can be done by taking the current (amps) figure off the rating plate on the back of the equipment in question and multiplying it by the UK voltage of 230v.

3: Add the VA ratings together to produce an overall rating figure for the system.

4: The UPS must have a VA rating in excess of the total VA rating of the system to be protected. The UPS should be oversized by at least 30 per cent to allow for future expansion.

It is also important to base UPS selection on the existing networking infrastructure and the underlying business model. The most suitable type will depend greatly on the structure of the network.

You also need to consider where exactly on the infrastructure the UPS should be installed. For instance, does it sit locally on the server, where it then serves the PCs hanging from it, or does each PC need a UPS deployed locally?

In fact, both the above scenarios are feasible and selection depends on the circumstances. A general rule of thumb is that the size and type of UPS model to be deployed is proportional to the size of server it must protect.

For example, if most of an organisation's data resides in the data centre on several large enterprise servers (as in a thin client structure), then one or two large UPSs will generally be deployed there.

But if the company employs a flatter, more distributed networking structure, smaller departmentalised systems should be spread around the organisation accordingly.