The unified physical infrastructure approach

Whether you’re responsible for a small team, a large group, or an entire organization, thriving in today’s dynamic and resource conscious world demands that your enterprise be agile and flexible at all levels. A robust infrastructure is critical to help you manage costs and meet sustainability goals while reliably and cost-effectively addressing challenges across business and technology domains.

Business challenges include:

• Provide superior business value
• Enhance customer experience
• Improve business agility
• Identify and leverage emerging opportunities
• Reduce deployed capital and operational expense
• Enhance energy efficiency, meet sustainability goals
• Manage risk and complexity
• Enhance public reputation
• Meet complex and changing compliance regulations

Technology challenges include:

• Keep pace with rapidly changing paradigms
• Drive innovation through the entire infrastructure
• (applications, logical/physical infrastructure)
• Ensure interoperability of complex infrastructure systems
• Improve efficiency of manufacturing and building systems
• Maintain network availability, scalability and physical security
• Meet power, cooling, space, performance, and speed requirements

The physical infrastructure is the foundation on which all enterprise systems operate - power, communication, computing, control and security. Research shows that faults within the physical infrastructure cause a majority of system downtime. Enterprises require a reliable and resilient infrastructure that overcome current business challenges and can scale to meet future demands.

Panduit Unified Physical Infrastructure℠ (UPI) Approach - A Guiding Vision

Panduit offers a comprehensive and holistic approach called the Unified Physical Infrastructure℠ or UPI. The UPI approach enables organizations to connect, manage and automate critical systems and drive operational, financial and sustainability advantages, allowing your business to minimize risk, lower cost, and heighten agility and reliability.

Flexible, end-to-end UPI-based solutions help meet business and technology challenges head on for a smarter, unified business foundation.

The increased demands being placed on your physical infrastructure require the integration of traditionally disparate and proprietary systems. Industry leaders continue to extend and converge their business infrastructure across all core system domains - communication, computing, control, power, and security.

What is Panduit Doing to Realize the UPI Vision?

The degree of unification across the physical infrastructure can be defined in terms of three levels - Align, Converge, and Optimize. An initial objective is to focus on simple interoperability of critical systems specific to individual enterprise areas (i.e., data centers, building systems, the factory floor). As interoperability becomes more established and sophisticated over time, this objective will expand to address convergence across multiple areas. The vision leads to an optimized Unified Physical Infrastructure that provides substantial benefits.

Resource Management

Panduit helps organizations realize higher asset utilization from their infrastructure investment by applying UPI principles across people, processes, and systems:

• People. Panduit's UPI vision calls for a collaborative exchange across organizations, from internal teams such as finance, IT, and facilities to stakeholders across the value chain (architects, engineers, consultants, contractors, and manufacturers).
• Processes. The holistic UPI approach to infrastructure design drives process efficiencies across the project lifecycle, enabling stakeholders to realize improved operational benefits such as lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and optimized facility management.
• Systems. Panduit's consultative approach aligns people and processes toward the UPI vision. This approach enables stakeholders to effectively align and converge the complex array of systems that comprise the Unified Physical Infrastructure.

Technology Strategy and Offering Portfolio

An effective Technology Strategy in concert with key Alliance Partners transforms and streamlines the infrastructure in three key areas:

• Unification. Connect and standardize systems to enable holistic management of a portfolio of streamlined, scalable physical infrastructure solutions.
• Instrumentation. Improve operational processes by bringing all systems under one dashboard to allow deepest visibility into the physical infrastructure and enable best business decisions.
• Integration. Deploy enterprise resource management and policy-based management applications to enable a more agile, automated approach to managing the unified, instrumented infrastructure.

Benefits of the UPI Approach

Panduit draws from proven methodologies and global best practices to allow organizations to leverage existing assets and investments and overcome operational challenges to achieve lowest cost of ownership.

• Mitigate Risk - Efficient physical infrastructure management enables seamless integration to reduce risks which can occur throughout the network.
• Lower Cost - Panduit physical infrastructure solutions drive financial advantages to reduce energy and occupancy costs, and help secure competitive advantage.
• Increase Agility - A high level of integration within the physical infrastructure enables flexibility and improved business agility.
• Enhance Sustainability - UPI-based solution offerings enable organizations to meet sustainability goals by driving resource and energy efficiencies across the physical infrastructure.

End-to-End Infrastructure Management and Monitoring

The UPI approach enables the use of software solutions designed to deliver tangible infrastructure and business process improvements for increased functionality, interoperability, security, and manageability of mission critical operations across the enterprise.

Driven by the industry's most comprehensive approach to physical infrastructure unification, Panduit designed and developed the Physical Infrastructure Manager™ (PIM™) Software Platform as a critical component of Panduit's UPI approach for systems integration.

The PIM™ Software Platform enables intelligent management of the physical infrastructure by providing end-to-end, real-time network visibility and management that helps quickly identify and resolve connectivity issues, find and reclaim available or underutilized network capacity, and automate real-time and accurate connectivity documentation.

This deep visibility into real-time systems information also enables data center stakeholders to optimize their IT processes for power, cooling, space, speed and performance from an operational standpoint.

The result is minimized network downtime (supporting service level agreements), improved network capacity planning and resource provisioning, and overall reduced capital and operating costs

UPI Vision Realized in New Panduit World Headquarters Building

When planning its new World Headquarters Building, Panduit project leaders invested in a UPI-based Connected Building Solution to enable convergence of facility systems onto a single network for improved control, communication, and management. This unified approach to infrastructure architecture across data centers, IT networks, connected buildings, and the factory floor offers advantages to owners, employees, visitors, and guests:

• Improved building system management - providing greater visibility and control of critical systems that identify, monitor, and resolve problems before they affect workers, enhancing overall security and safety
• Converged networks - that enable enhanced commissioning and help meet energy performance requirements
• Multi-technology architecture - that extends the reach of cabling infrastructures to all endpoint devices, creating seamless integration of building systems including IP telephony, wireless connectivity, digital media and unified communications
• Converged infrastructure design - to reduce deployed capital and maintenance costs throughout the lifecycle of the building
• Flexibility - to accommodate changing user needs, from mobility services to environmental controls

The new facility will enable collaboration through unique design features ranging from open office concepts, shared work spaces, and the deployment of the latest tools. Also, to provide a healthy workplace and minimize our ecological footprint, Panduit will achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification, reinforcing our commitment to the environment and realizing significant energy savings.

UPI: The Foundation for Innovation

Panduit is the only vendor in the industry with a tightly integrated portfolio of innovative physical infrastructure solutions. Thorough established strategic alliances with top global industry leaders such as Cisco Systems, IBM, Rockwell Automation, Johnson Controls, and Lutron, Panduit develops holistic UPI-based solutions for our customers.

We continually invest in relationships and resources to solve our customers' greatest business and technology challenges. Our unique, robust partner ecosystem offers a lifecycle of services for innovative modeling, predictable execution, and operational excellence. This comprehensive approach to infrastructure design, deployment, and management allows benefits to be realized across systems and throughout the entire enterprise.

Ultimately, Panduit helps customers mitigate risk across the physical infrastructure and build a smarter, unified business foundation.