Marknadsundersökning inom datacenterbranschen : Undersökning av tekniska inköp, med fokuspå kyllösningar

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to examine how investments are justified in the Swedish data center industry, with a focus on cooling equipment. This is achieved through semi-structured interviews with 20 different interviewees. These interviewees represent different facets of the industry and facilitate an understanding of which factors, such as: investment costs, operating costs, reliability, environmental impact and the influence of external and internal actors, come into play and to which degree they impact the investment decision-making process. The results show that primarily low operating cost in the form of low energy consumption is the driving factor when it comes to the procurement of new equipment. A lower environmental impact is a positive side-effect of lower energy consumption. But alone it does not justify an additional investment. Data center downtime has a negative impact financially and can also adversely affect various functions critical to society. Therefore, the dependability of the equipment is still a priority, but reliability is now considered to have reached such a level that it is considered acceptable and the focus of development has shifted towards energy efficiency. The interview study is complemented by an investment-theory review of articles and books on related subject matter. This subject matter is linked directly or indirectly to disposition of investment in the data center industry. The framework developed from the review is then compared to the interview results. Results indicate that decision and investment theory in many cases can also be applied to data center investments. Theories that are more environmentally and socially oriented, such as Triple Bottom Line, are not consistent with the empirical data from the interviews. The investment decisions are also influenced by the current high availability and high reliability of data centers, which is the reason why the industry is rife with inertia, conservatism and skepticism to new solutions. Consequently, the parallel between data centers and high risk organizations, HRO, brought a new approach to how priorities are evaluated within HROs, namely that it is possible to combine high reliability with a low environmental impact. The results of the study are used as the basis to establish a marketing plan for the company SEE Cooling, a startup company that supplies cooling equipment. This marketing plan is based on the models for: Network analysis, Porter's five forces analysis, SWOT analysis and Kotler's marketing mix. The resulting marketing plan offers proposals on how SEE Cooling shall navigate their business network to overcome conservatism and promote their products, and illustrates potential difficulties.