Cisco is opening a new data center cooling hub in France and plans to expand its local technical training program.

Both initiatives are noteworthy for the company’s regional consulting partners.

When a firm buys data center equipment from Cisco, it must either hire personnel to manage it or entrust the task to a consultancy. Both of those operational models require access to a local pool of qualified IT professionals. The more Cisco-savvy administrators there are in a given market, the easier it becomes for local companies to use the company’s hardware.

The first initiative that Cisco is launching in France is designed to grow the local IT talent pool. Over the next three years, the company plans to provide IT training to 230,000 people in the country. Some of this training will focus on issuing professional certifications, which are credentials that qualify an employee for tasks such as managing Cisco switches. The company will also offer free courses spanning fields such as cybersecurity, data science and AI.

The other initiative announced by Cisco will see it launch a new “global center of expertise for innovative cooling solutions for data centers.” The company didn’t disclose additional details other than that the hub will be located in Paris. Earlier this year, however, Cisco divulged that it had inked partnerships with multiple data center cooling providers. It stated that it would work with those partners to provide liquid cooling equipment for data centers.

Historically, server clusters relied on fans to remove heat. Fans are still useful for cooling machines that are powered solely by central processing units, but the situation changes once GPUs are added in. The most advanced GPU-powered servers generate significantly more heat than what an industrial fan can dissipate. As a result, data center operators are switching to liquid cooling technology, which can manage higher temperatures than fans. This trend is driving changes at not only hardware vendors such as Cisco but also IT consultancies that specialize in data center management. As more servers enter the market with liquid cooling gear instead of fans, more IT consultancies will have to refresh their professionals’ skill sets. Vendor-managed training programs such as those offered by Cisco could play an important role in easing that shift.

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