Anti-fail power system popular

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) manufacturer American Power Conversion has captured a dominant share of the local market, according to a survey of 200 resellers.

The CM Research survey showed that 66 per cent of computer resellers were selling American Power equipment and more than 75 per cent of those stocked it exclusively.

Leanne Cunnold, the company's Australia and New Zealand general manager, said the UPS market was benefiting from the increased use of servers in e-commerce applications.

While Ms Cunnold refused to reveal local sales figures, she said that in Australia last year the UPS market had grown at more than four times the rate of the rest of the IT industry, and Australasian sales were in line with the parent company's performance.

The firm's worldwide revenue for the second quarter was $US365.7 million ($795 million), 16 per cent up on the same quarter last year, with annual revenue amounting to $US1.337 billion in 1999.

Ms Cunnold said that while servers were now designed with built-in redundancy, with one component taking over from another in the case of failure, a single point of failure could still occur in the power supply.

"Many companies' computer systems have become part of their shopfronts and to lose the system means that they are losing revenue.

"People are now realising that their data is more important than their hardware, and power failure is the most common cause of data loss, accounting for 46 per cent of all cases."

Ms Cunnold joked that American Power divided customers into two categories: those who had suffered a power failure and those who were about to. "It's not if, it's when."

A UPS could protect a system from other power-related dangers, she said.

A recent study by IBM showed that the average PC was subjected to 120 power disturbances a month, including spikes and voltage drops known as "brownouts."

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