News

CUI and VPS Strengthen Software-Defined Power Partnership

July 10, 2018 by Paul Shepard

CUI Global, Inc. announced today that its wholly-owned Power & Electromechanical Division, CUI Inc., has entered into an amended partnership agreement with Virtual Power Systems (VPS) on the design, development, marketing and sales of VPS's proprietary Intelligent Control of Energy® (ICE) Software Defined Power® (SDP) infrastructure.

In a separate agreement, CUI Global has made an investment for a minority stake in VPS in support of the companies' continued collaboration and development of industry transforming SDP technologies.

Under the terms of the amended partnership agreement, CUI has extended its exclusive relationship with VPS to 2024 from the original expiry date of 2019. The agreement also calls for an automatic renewal provision and enhanced protections around CUI's intellectual property as it relates to ICE Block and ICE Switch, the industry's first SDP ICE Compatible devices based on VPS's ICE software platform.

CUI's ICE-compatible devices, when combined with VPS's ICE software, provides data center operators with the ability to increase power density at the rack level while consolidating racks in the data center 2:1 by tapping into "stranded unutilized power capacity."

Building on the companies' amended partnership, CUI Global's investment in VPS supports the development of Hyper-Converged Power Infrastructure solutions, and, ultimately, federation and orchestration of power and IT loads across multiple data centers.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is a software-defined solution that simplifies the deployment and management of datacenter resources - compute, storage, networking and power. According to a January 2018 report by market research firm Statistics MRC, the global hyper-converged infrastructure market is expected to reach $17 billion in 2023 from $1.5 billion in 2016.

CUI Global President & CEO William Clough stated, "At a time when market awareness of our ICE Technology is growing and early adopters have started to place orders for both ICE Switch and ICE Block, the amended partnership secures our access to VPS' software IP and cements our position as the exclusive provider of ICE Technology hardware.

"Our investment in VPS is consistent with our history of technology acquisitions and new product introductions that disrupt markets," continued Mr. Clough.

"CUI and VPS share a common vision and approach to delivering on the promise of software-defined-power, its immense value to customers, and the transformation of power utilization in datacenters.  Underscoring this vision, our investment supports VPS' efforts to expand the application of SDP solutions to include hyper-converged SDP infrastructure, thereby creating additional avenues of growth for CUI," Mr. Clough concluded.

"The relationship between CUI and VPS has produced incredibly innovative integrated hardware and software solutions and accelerated market acceptance of Software Defined Power," said Steve Houck, CEO Virtual Power Systems.

"We share a vision of developing new unique Hyper-Converged SDP infrastructure, while also working together to accelerate the integration of industry standard power infrastructure from all the major power component manufacturers into the software-defined datacenter," Houck added.