Jon Temple, President and CEO nlyte Software gives his view on data centre management
The recent expansion of data centres has been significant, and forecasts predict that the global data centre market will expand at a rate of 5-10% over the next few years (Frost & Sullivan). Such growth will significantly impact the environment – data centres already account for 3% of total energy consumption worldwide, and data centre greenhouse gas emissions will overtake the airline industry emissions within the next 5-10 years.
Whilst there is no way to deny the growing demand for data centres, Jon Temple, President and CEO of data centre infrastructure management company nlyte Software, believes that its impact can be tempered. However he also feels that purely appealing to a company’s sense of green responsibility will yield poor results:
“There is considerable vendor fatigue around the green IT story. Customers are interested in corporate environmental sustainability initiatives, but in this market they continue to focus primarily on the business fundamentals of top line growth and expense reduction. As such nlyte aims to help customers reduce their power expenses, extend the life of existing data centre facilities and improve business process efficiency.
So corporations focus on performance first and environmental sustainability initiatives second, partly because the penalties for non compliance are not aggressive enough to force change. There will be a tipping point, but only when governments take a more aggressive stance and the tsunami of legislation is about to break on the shores of every country around the globe. When it does, companies will realise that these initiatives have teeth. The ensuing change in behaviour will be widespread. nlyte will be one of the technologies that will support and enable compliance”
nlyte Software recently won the “One to Watch Product” accolade at the Green IT Awards 2010, however their solutions also make pure business sense, as Temple explains:
“Our solution is designed to help reduce data centre operating expenses through the optimal placement of assets. This can reduce power expenses by up to 20% on a year on year basis. When you consider the power bill for even a modestly sized data centre, that 20% power saving can equate to over $4 Million on an annualised basis so reining in these costs today is proving to be extremely important for our customers. By 2014 it’s going to be more expensive to run the data centre from a power perspective than to buy and manage the equipment in it, so for most organizations there is little time to lose.”
Between 2008 and 2009 nlyte grew over 130%, and has recently been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring's North America 100 award. Although Temple is understandably reluctant to “go public with the playbook to success” he does state that being in the right market at the right time is clearly helpful:
“Latest research states that there is just north of 106,000 data centres worldwide that house equal to, or greater than, 100 racks of equipment, and this makes our addressable market about $14.5 billion. Today only one company in a hundred utilises data centre management solutions, which presents a significant forward looking opportunity for nlyte software. This is a rare thing in an otherwise rapidly consolidating enterprise software market.”
Jon Temple
Prior to nlyte Software, Temple was EVP Worldwide Field Operations at Hyperion, growing company revenues to nearly $1 billion and helping to orchestrate the $3.3 billion Oracle acquisition in 2007. Prior to Hyperion, Temple was CEO of Above All Software and spent 12 years at Business Objects in a variety of executive sales and operational leadership positions. During his tenure, Business Objects defined and led the Business Intelligence category before being acquired by SAP for $6.8 billion.