UPS supplier Eaton has released a new open-source software development kit aimed at providing better accessibility and flexibility to users of its power management products.
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Hervé Tardy, the company's vice president and general manager of distributed power quality, says the ability to substantially modify the management software based on the specific needs of each client is a powerful upside to the firm's technology.
"In the power market, we see a lot of customers with specific integration needs, for which they will need to tweak the power management software the ... vendor is providing. Using open source is great leverage for that because it really gives the opportunity ... to the system integrator to really tweak the software the way they want to perform whatever tasks they intend to," he asserts.
If Eaton's SDK isn't enough to allow clients to make all the adjustments they want to on their own, the company has offered to tailor its software to the customer's needs in-house, free of charge.
What kinds of requests does Eaton get? "It can be multiple things. Compatibility with safety and security features [are] on top of the list," Tardy says, though he notes that the nature of the requests varies widely and is difficult to generalize.
That security emphasis, he adds, is particularly prominent in the financial sector.
"Large banks and financial institutions ... always have very specific needs in terms of security and these types of things. I would say the commercial power management software packages available typically do not integrate well with this type of application. So there's always a need [for] customization. Using open source for that, making all the source code available with all the proper documentation, is really something that is easy to do," Tardy says.
The importance of UPS technology has only increased with the advent of more distributed computing models. Companies using a private cloud model, in particular, need uptimes of as close to 100% as possible from their data centers.
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