• Connection to enterprise IT — Emerson has sold a lot of chillers, UPS and PDU equipment and has tremendous cachet with facilities types, but they don’t have a lot of people who know how to talk IT. IBM has these people in spades.
• IBM can use a DCIM offering  — IBM, despite being a huge player in the IT infrastructure and data center space, does not have a DCIM product. Its Maximo product seems to be more of a dressed up asset management product, and this partnership is an acknowledgement of the fact that to build a full-fledged DCIM product would have been both expensive and time-consuming.
• IBM adds sales bandwidth — My belief is that the development of the DCIM market has been delivery bandwidth constrained. Market leaders Nlyte, Emerson and Schneider do not have enough people to address the emerging total demand, and the host of smaller players are even further behind. IBM has the potential to massively multiply Emerson’s ability to deliver to the market.

The impact of this partnership will ripple through the industry, across both users, Emerson’s competitors and IBM’s competitors:

• Prospective DCIM users now have the option to buy from one of the dominant industry IT system suppliers, and one with a nearly unlimited services capability.
• Emerson competitors will be under more pressure to bolster their delivery channels and to find similar partnerships.
• IBM competitors in both the hardware and management software will be looking for DCIM vendors to partner with to fill in their portfolios to match IBM.

My net takeaway is that this a major dislocation in the emerging DCIM segment and will trigger a wave of realignment among DCIM, systems and software vendors. The end beneficiaries will be potential DCIM users, who have just seen their ability to acquire and support such solutions multiplied by a large factor, and now available from a name that is very familiar to the IT stakeholders. Emerson gets a major leg up on its competitors, and IBM gets a powerful product offering that it can use to enhance its already strong position as an enterprise data center supplier.