Panduit’s hot for cooling vendor SynapSense

Contact: Rhonda Ascierto Scott Denne

Panduit, primarily a datacenter cabling vendor, has acquired SynapSense, a datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) software company. This is Panduit’s second acquisition in the DCIM market, which hasn’t seen much M&A overall. The company is working on providing a unified offering of datacenter technologies, with software at the center.

We forecast more than 40% CAGR for the DCIM market. Despite that growth, it is a challenging environment for small pure-play firms like SynapSense. The market is plagued by protracted sales cycles and crowded with more than 55 vendors, including several large datacenter equipment makers and enterprise IT software providers.

SynapSense brings dynamic cooling optimization software to Panduit’s asset management and monitoring offerings, which it shored up with the acquisition of Unite Technologies almost two years ago. SynapSense’s software is sophisticated and relatively mature – yet perhaps too advanced for much of the slow-to-change datacenter space.

We would expect Panduit to continue to grow its software reach via future M&A as software and services are becoming an important competitive differentiator for all datacenter equipment suppliers.

We’ll have a more detailed analysis of this deal in tomorrow’s 451 Market Insight.

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