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With more than 5,000 customers, partners, colleagues and countless others in attendance, there’s a solid chance I did! But for those of you who didn’t join us at this year’s event, there are more opportunities in the future. But first…
What is Innovation Summit?
Innovation Summit is Schneider Electric’s event series which brings together experts, thought-leaders and executives to discuss the future of powering and digitizing the economy through the convergence of automation and energy technology. Events are global, throughout the year with several Global Innovation Summits already on the calendar. Global Innovation Summit in Paris kicked off with a keynote delivered by our CEO, Jean-Pascal Tricoire. We in the data center biz know that data centers are critical to building the digital economy and that sentiment came through loud and clear in Jean-Pascal’s keynote highlighting two of our colocation customers: Interxion and Pulse Data Centre. These two companies are meeting the demand for data center capacity by partnering with Schneider for faster deployment, leveraging our combined expertise to mitigate risk and deploying EcoStruxure™ for optimization.
Bold Ideas Everywhere
There’s a lot to see and do during our Innovation Summit events and our Cloud & Service Providers found a tailored experience to learn, exchange bold ideas and network. During the World Premiere, Kevin Brown, CTO of our IT Division announced EcoStruxure Asset Advisor. Colocation customers know better than most the detrimental impact downtime has on business growth. Bringing to bear the promise of IoT, Asset Advisor is our data-driven predictive maintenance service to drive efficiency and mitigate risk in the data center. Kevin also took colocation providers for a walk into the future, sharing his view of the technologies that will drive the next 80% of data center performance gains including: new architectures to enable hybrid environments, cooling strategies that include air economization and liquid cooling, lithium ion batteries and renewable energy.
Head of our IT Division, Dave Johnson presented a Strategy Talk illuminating the criticality of hybrid IT ecosystems inclusion of cloud, regional edge and local edge data centers and how to manage its complexities. Dave shares some real-world case studies of customers benefiting from cloud-based systems to manage these environments and you can watch Dave in action:
Mark Bidinger, President of the Cloud & Service Providers segment, led a panel discussion introducing us to Fabrice Coquio, President of Interxion France and Olivier Micheli, CEO of Data4. These colocation visionaries provided the standing room only audience with their insights regarding how colocation providers will answer the increasing demands of the digital economy. The panel shared the bold ideas that have contributed to their successful growth.
Growing Pains for Colocation Providers
Hearing from customers directly is always the best part of any event for me, and my time in Paris did not disappoint. While I love to hear their successes, it’s the side conversations to talk about their current challenges and pains that provide me with the greatest insights. Cloud and colocation providers are experiencing unprecedented demand, but with that comes growing pains. This event series generates the awareness and discussion required to help our customers overcomes these challenges.
Attend our next Global Innovation Summit
Whether you were just in Paris like me or if you’re interested in attending one of our many Innovation Summits this year, join us and get involved!
