In response to ongoing growth of the data center market Panasonic Corp. is looking to expand its role in supplying components to data center equipment vendors.

Jeff Hnatek, senior business development manager for the Japanese electronics giant, said the company was already selling some components into the space but had a lot more opportunities to leverage products it already makes or has the capacity to make. “We have a lot of building blocks for items that are used today in data center facilities,” he said.

DCD Intelligence projects continued growth in data center space, globally, for the next three years. In North America alone, the market is projected to grow from US$46.3bn today to about $56.6bn in 2016, Nicola Hayes, DCD Intelligence managing director, said during a presentation at the DCD Converged Dallas conference Thursday.

Being the most mature market, North America is expected to grow much slower than other regions, namely Latin America and Asia Pacific.

The products Panasonic can sell to data center vendors include batteries for uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, air conditioner components, lighting, equipment racks and, potentially, Blu-ray Disc as media for archival data storage (often referred to as “cold storage”).

The range of potential customers in the data center market Panasonic can address is wide. They can be electrical and mechanical infrastructure vendors, such as Emerson Network Power, Schneider Electric or ABB, or, if Blu-ray Disc proves to be a viable technology for cold storage, companies that sell storage arrays, such as EMC Corp., NetApp, HP or Dell.

Panasonic is only starting to develop and define its strategy for expansion in the space, so there are no specific plans yet, Hnatek said. One thing that is clear is that the company is not looking to start building data centers or work in them. It wants to sell into data centers through existing suppliers.

It has already been selling into the space indirectly, but the play has primarily consisted of low-end “passive” components – things like capacitors and resistors. “We’ve sold into basically every server [vendor], from Oracle to Dell, in the past, for passives,” Hnatek said.

Mark Reed, North American director of the Data Center Industry Sector Initiative of the Swiss power and automation giant ABB, said more competition in the components market would only be good for vendors and customers. ABB is one of the companies Panasonic may potentially sell its data center components to.

“Having a new vendor in the market supplying those types of components pushes the other competitors to be more competitive from a technology standpoint [and] from a cost standpoint,” Reed said.