I've have some GE & APC units and I'll tell you the same thing I've told every one of those vendors: When dealing with a product at this caliber, I can't go wrong with any of them. If I buy a Mitsubishi unit or a Liebert unit, they're all good units, bar none. Each vendor will debate why theirs is better bet in the end all will do the job.  The key is what is the right product at the time I'm going to buy which meets my needs. Who's got the best feature set, the richest feature set, the best price, and the best capabilities. What is the best return on my money at the end of the day.

Once that's said, it really comes down to the service organization and the reliability of the units. I have had issues with all the products and I am sure everyone out there has as well.  It's just I have had fewer issues with my Eatons than they have had with their other vendors.

I also believe in standards. Once I've picked a product line, my first choice for the next unit would be Eaton.  There are economies of scale having so many of them.

It comes down to this: When Eaton comes out to service units, they spend two-three days, and can cover them all. I'm not having to multiple vendors and schedule visits which consume my time.  I have one throat to choke, one contract, and one great relationship.  As a corporation, they still have the flexibility to be able to deal with the customer in that manner. Today, their service and customer relationships are their biggest value, absolutely, compared to the competitors I deal with.

The Eaton service organization is one of their strongest points.

The other UPSs we're using are from Eaton's direct competitors, which is Vertiv or Liebert.

Before Eaton, we used a number of different solutions, like Tripplite and APC.

I still have two Toshiba 9000 series UPSs in our Phoenix data center.

Eaton UPSs are inherently efficient. I replaced Liebert 500 and 600 series UPSs with these. The Liebert UPSs were about 40 percent efficient at the load level that we were at. These Eatons, even worst case, moved it to 90 percent. Toshiba would have saved me money. Any of the newer UPSs would have saved similar amounts. Just moving to a newer UPS saved me lots of money.

We had some aging units throughout the city. Some of them were 15-plus years old, and it was a matter of starting to replace them one at a time. About 80 percent of our units are now from Eaton. We've slowly converted almost the entire city to Eaton.

The only other UPS solution that we were using was our GE UPS, which is still in place right now.

Prior to having Eaton's BladeUPS in the five locations we have them, one location did not have a UPS, three were new construction, and the fifth one had a UPS, but it was a single-phase and it was about 20 years old.

At that last location I chose Eaton because I'd used it before. The first location I did with Eaton was a distribution center. Before Eaton, every time that center lost power — and it was right at the end of the grid, so it lost power a lot — the network would go dead and we'd have to recover the network and everything else. That's when we decided to put the UPS in. That's when I did the little evaluation I did. I worked with CDW for that. In fact, I've bought all of them through CDW.

Before Eaton's products we had APC stuff. In terms of the reasons we switched:

• capacity for the footprint was one 
• price was absolutely another 
• the scalability.

Every UPS company makes similar products and it's just a matter of finding what products meet your needs. We needed a 60kW in a footprint that was three-phase, that was 208 volt. This fit the bill. It was the same thing with their 93PM offering. There are two companies that make a 200kW and 208 volt. One of them is Liebert and the other one is Eaton. The Eaton one is about 20 percent cheaper and does the same thing and it is still a reputable company.

We have different vendors for UPS. We have three or four. But Eaton is our standard, currently, because of the reliability and the reputation of the company and the product.

We were using an older style, the 9315s from Eaton. But we've always been using Eaton UPSs for backup power.

We previously used GE. We switched to Eaton because we didn't have the best experience with GE. We had issues with their equipment, such as a failure.