Uptime Institute Report Highlights Sunbird DCIM’s Role in Data Center Automation

As data center professionals plan for 2026 and beyond, it’s important to understand and consider the trends shaping the industry.

Uptime Institute’s Five Data Center Predictions for 2026 examines some of the latest developments and challenges in the data center industry, including “AI automation in the data center moves from pilots into production.”

According to Uptime Institute, the pressures driving automation include operational complexity caused by AI workloads and GPU-intensive clusters, global workforce shortages, and expanding ESG reporting frameworks and emerging regional efficiency regulations.

In the full report, Uptime Institute cites Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software, including Sunbird DCIM specifically, for its role in supporting automation in the data center with capabilities such as automatically adjusting power budgets and flagging redundancy risks.

In this blog post, we’ll summarize Uptime Institute’s predictions for 2026 and explain how Sunbird DCIM enables the growing trend of practical automation in real-world data center operations.

Summary of Uptime’s Five Predictions for 2026

Uptime Institute’s predictions include:

1. Giants, supergiants and the rest: the AI ecosystem takes shape. AI infrastructure will concentrate among a small number of large providers, while all operators will see increased AI-driven demand and benefit from advances in power and cooling technologies.
2. Developers will not outrun the power shortage. Power constraints will intensify as data center demand outpaces grid capacity, increasing costs and limiting near-term options for securing power.
3. As emissions soar, operators look to carbon capture. Rising data center power demand will complicate net-zero goals and push some operators to explore carbon capture as a way to reduce direct emissions.
4. Scale adds new challenges, but resiliency will still be essential. Larger facilities and grid instability will raise outage risks, forcing operators to rethink how resiliency and redundancy are designed and managed.
5. AI automation in the data center moves from pilots to production. AI-driven automation will shift into daily operations, with rules-based systems handling routine tasks and advanced tools supporting optimization under human oversight.

In prediction 5, Uptime Intelligence highlights three categories of automation technologies emerging in data center operations:

• Reinforcement learning and hybrid digital twins that continuously optimize power and cooling based on real-time feedback.
• Industrial copilots that apply conversational interfaces to operational workflows.
• Smarter rules-based orchestration/intelligent automation that allow operators to apply rule-based conditions to live sensor data.

Here, Uptime Institute reports, “Platforms such as… Power IQ/dcTrack (Sunbird) support automated responses such as adjusting power budgets or flagging redundancy risks, and can integrate with more adaptive AI components.”

This recognition reflects a broader shift Uptime Institute is observing across the industry that automation is becoming a core operational capability, grounded in accurate, real-time infrastructure data and rules-based decisioning.

How Sunbird DCIM Enables Data Center Automation

Here are some practical ways Sunbird DCIM supports the automation trend Uptime Institute describes:

• Business rules engine. Sunbird’s business rules engine allows customers to create a series of automated actions based on user-configurable conditions, saving time and effort while ensuring information is updated accurately.
• Automatic device power budgeting. Rather than using static, nameplate estimates for device power budgets, Sunbird’s Auto Power Budget uses intelligent rack PDU data to automatically calculate an accurate power budget number for each device instance based upon its actual measured load, enabling customers to eliminate stranded power capacity and deploy more devices in their existing facilities.
• Load shift detection. Sunbird’s Load Shift Detection leverages data from outlet-metered intelligent rack PDUs to detect and alert when the load shifts from one power supply on an IT device to another, indicating a potential loss of redundancy.
• Automation via integration. Sunbird’s out-of-the-box connectors and fully documented APIs make it easy to integrate your multi-vendor tools to create a single pane of glass. Customers are integrating Sunbird with tools like ServiceNow, Jira, VMware, Cisco ACI, Dell OME, and HPE OneView to reduce manual effort, gain more complete information, and improve cross-team collaboration.

Additional Sunbird DCIM capabilities supporting automation of routine tasks include:

• Automatic creation and scheduling of charts and reports
• Automatic backups of Raritan and ServerTech PDU configurations
• Request and work order email notifications
• Event notifications
• Threshold alerts for rack, inlet, and circuit breaker loads, three-phase balance, circuit breaker state change, temperature, humidity, and parts

Real-World Customer Stories

Real examples that illustrate how Sunbird DCIM drives automation in the data center include:

• Comcast. By leveraging Sunbird’s Auto Power Budget feature to automatically calculate highly accurate device power budgets, Comcast unlocked 40% more capacity out of their existing power and facilities resources. They also use business rules to automatically update asset installation dates when their lifecycle status changes, generate unique cabinet serial numbers for integration with ServiceNow, and more.
• Workday. Workday leverages Sunbird’s APIs to integrate with other tools to automate provisioning and orchestration, VM data management, device state tracking, parts management, and more.
• eBay. eBay integrates Sunbird DCIM with ServiceNow via APIs to automate asset tracking. Over 600 daily updates for adds, moves, changes, and retirements flow automatically between systems, reducing manual effort, improving accuracy, and supporting remote data center management.
• Accenture. Accenture uses Sunbird’s business rules engine to automate asset disposal—moving items marked “For Disposal” to a dedicated location, updating fields, triggering work orders, and archiving them automatically. This reduces errors, supports compliance, and keeps records accurate.

Bringing It All Together

The shift Uptime Institute describes isn’t about replacing operators with AI robots. It’s about making data center operations more reliable, responsive, and efficient through smart automation built on operational data.

Sunbird DCIM provides that foundation through an accurate, real-time digital twin that enables policy-driven automation in daily operations and integrates with other tools to deliver a single pane of glass.

To learn more about Uptime Institute’s predictions for 2026, watch its on-demand webinar. If you would like to access the full report and other insights from Uptime, you can request an evaluation of Uptime Intelligence.