A healthy market for power solutions and services, coupled with a more efficiently staffed sales organization and broader product catalog, are fueling robust revenue gains for Eaton Corp.‘s power quality division.
The Raleigh, N.C.-based vendor grew its top line by a figure in the “high teens” last year, and has set a similarly aggressive goal for 2019, according to Curtiz Gangi, vice president of channel sales for Eaton’s U.S. data center segment.
“We’re outpacing the market,” he says. Gangi spoke with ChannelPro during the 2019 edition of Eaton’s annual partner summit event, which concluded yesterday in Huntington Beach, Calif.
The arrival of infrastructure refresh cycles among both SMBs and larger businesses has played a big part in Eaton’s current momentum, according to Herve Tardy, vice president and general manager of Eaton’s distributed power quality division.
“The fundamentals of the market are great,” he says. “I think it’s the best market conditions I’ve ever seen.”
Gangi credits the organizational changes his group introduced last year for contributing to Eaton’s recent performance as well. Those revisions, which Gangi discussed with ChannelPro at last year’s partner summit, involved turning a single, overextended set of partner account managers into separate teams dedicated to partner development on the one hand and opportunity development on the other.
“You had one team of people who were trying to do too much essentially,” Gangi says. The new division of labor, by contrast, allows Eaton to both pursue more deals with partners and engage more deeply with them.
A final, critical ingredient in Eaton’s current success, according to Gangi, is the breadth of its power portfolio, which now spans from uninterrupted power supplies and power distribution units to racks and enclosures, as well as a variety of monitoring applications and support services.
“I’ve got a pretty big basket of products other than just the power products,” Gangi notes, adding that bundling those varied offerings together has enabled Eaton and its partners to pursue deals involving converged and hyperconverged infrastructure deployments, Internet of Things solutions, and networking upgrades, among other projects.
The revamped partner program Eaton unveiled at this week’s summit event is designed to extend the company’s solution sales gains by providing added training and certification opportunities and higher discounts to the vendor’s most committed and engaged partners.
“We have another high teen growth goal for this organization this year,” Gangi notes. “We can’t do it without our partners understanding where we need to go.”
