EPI
Empowering Enterprises to Design Mission Critical Data Centers

Data centers are the engine rooms of the global business community and hence have become mission-critical and crucial to the operations of a business. The data center industry today is undergoing a tremendous amount of change, not only on the IT side but also facilities side. Besides that, data centers also need to deal with changes that impact the way the IT and data center facilities support the business with new trends such as Big Data, IoT (Internet of Things), and of course Cloud. Therefore, data centers must be designed, maintained, and operated with high-availability and efficiency in mind to support the business whilst at the same time being prepared for the future. This is where EPI comes into play. This well-respected global firm delivers a wide range of data center infrastructure services, including training, consulting, auditing and certification.

Research has shown that there is a shortage of well-trained data center professionals. It is not uncommon to see IT trained personnel having to take care, and decide on, data center facility related matters such as power and cooling. “This is like having a baker running a butcher shop,” said Edward van Leent, Chairman and CEO of the EPI group of companies. The shortage of adequate training lead often to employees sorting things out themselves by going online for a solution, that often leads to tremendous waste of valuable time and often confuse people more due to the never ending conflicting information. “Sending employees to training can create enormous benefits by having correct and vendor neutral information in a short period of time making the employee immediately effective,” notes Van Leent. Having tremendous real practical expertise, EPI offers a variety of globally accredited certified data center professional training. EPI’s wide range of professional trainings covers the physical data center design and builds and project implementation, operational management, risk management, data center migration and standards based training for standards such as ANSI/TIA-942. The courses are designed for anybody involved in the data center, whether as an owner, customer or a supplier.

All EPI’s courses and exams are accredited by EXIN, an independent IT and data center training, examination and certification accreditation body.

With high quality data center training certifications with truly independent global accreditation we have gained many organizations trust and managed to be by far the largest data center training provider in the world

“EXIN ensures that our course and exam development and maintenance process is following their very strict accreditation guidelines and processes to ensure consistency in our quality and to ensure that our courses are vendor agnostic and add business value rather than just being a few pretty slides,” mentions Van Leent. To further assist the customers to understand the competences required in a data cent¬er environment, EPI has also built the world’s first and only Data Center Competence Framework (DCCF®) that assists managers and employees to understand what training is required for which competences for a specific job.

Several organizations have realized that without adequate processes and maintenance programmes, the data center availability levels will be affected, simultaneously eroding the investment made in the data center facility. Until now, there was no complete standard for data center operations and maintenance processes. “Addressing this gap, we recently initiated and led a committee to write a complete data center operations and maintenance standard, called EPI-DCOS®. This standard allows data centers to benchmark their operations and maintenance processes at the well-known 5-level, ISO based, process maturity levels,” says Van Leent.

“The way we stay ahead is by constantly improving our course material and to develop new courses and standards relevant to our industry,” says Van Leent. Further, the company attributes its success to hiring the best people in the industry. “This unique combination of great people and innovating products and services will help us to continue to be leading in the industry,” concludes Van Leent.