Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Minuteman is a leading manufacturer of power protection technologies.

The event hosted more than 3,000 attendees, and represented the first combined International conference of Avaya and heritage Nortel (News - Alert) user groups together under a single banner.

Hunteman said that Minuteman has been in the Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) industry for close to 30 years and has achieved levels of quality and support “above our competition.” And since the company comes out of a telephone-oriented background, instead of data, like most UPS firms, it’s given the company a bit of a different approach.

There are simply different expectations for phone and data systems.

“What started out in the phone system, because of the Internet is now moving to the data side of the house,” Hunteman said, remarking that he feels this gives his company “a bit of a jump” on some of those technologies and for “what people need out there.”

And naturally, the power protection company has seen its share of changes over 30 years.

“Everything’s on the network today,” Hunteman said, adding that because of that, they’re selling more SNMP products than their competitors. “People are very familiar with the networks,” he said, adding that “they’re looking for that better communication.”

As TMC’s (News - Alert) Susan J. Campbell wrote recently, the idea of power protection is a growing concern for companies and organizations all over the world as their operations depend upon consistent and reliable power to function: “The challenge in the United States is that utility companies have not kept pace with current demand in terms of equipment updates and power failures are increasing.” This is the natural market for UPS.

Chargers in the battery packs are critical, Hunteman said, noting that it’s a priority of Minuteman, saying they were the first ones to have an extended battery pack hooked up to a UPS. It’s been a strong suit of the company for years.

“If you remember a few years ago, San Francisco had two blackouts in a row,” Hunteman said. “The UPS survived the first blackout. The second blackout hit and everybody went down. Now with a charger in the battery pack, that would have kept it to a short amount of time to charge that battery pack back up,” to sustain through the second blackout.