DCIM has not taken off the way people thought, Why?

In the data center world there has been hype on DCIM.  Multiple start-ups have tried to build businesses on DCIM.  The electrical equipment supplier have added DCIM solutions.  Yet DCIM has not taken off.  I have had the pleasure or pain of seeing some DCIM implementations first hand and seen how they work or don’t.

So here are some of the reasons why I think DCIM has not lived up to its hype.

- Given the limited deployments many systems don’t scale well.

- Usability is not there yet.  Main focus has been to just get things to work.

- Manual data entry is required too many times.

- Decision makers who choose DCIM are not the operations staff, so there is a disconnect from expectations and reality.  Many people don’t know the operating expense of running a DCIM system.

- The data center market is actually a decreasing market from the total number of companies who are running data centers even though overall capacity is increasing.

- The big players have tried many of the services, and none is the killer app.

Given the hype is dying down it is pretty hard to launch a start-up targeting DCIM.  I would expect DCIM teams within electrical suppliers is finding it harder to get more resources and money given the limited sales.

If a DCIM solution scaled to 100K+ of servers, was easy to use,  automated data entry, bridged the reality of operations with executive expectations, a standard at the big data center users, then it would be the killer app.

I don’t see this happening any time soon.  Do you?  If you do which one of these can do it?

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