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As we begin this new year, I am very excited to have the opportunity to step up to lead the Secure Power Division of Schneider Electric as Executive Vice President. This opportunity is not one that I take lightly. It is the culmination of a 19-year career with Schneider, where I’ve had the privilege to contribute to the business in various roles and geographies.
Future-oriented vision: enabling resiliency in the New Electric World
Our world is changing rapidly with many trends emerging as a result. In the Secure Power Division, we are focused on the explosion in IoT and connected devices and the increasing electrification of our planet. Empowered by our legacy of legendary reliability, I am looking forward to strengthening Secure Power’s position as a partner and trusted advisor to enable resiliency in the new electric world.
At Schneider, we see the combination of electric and digital as the recipe for a more sustainable world and in turn, these two elements are key to powering the new electric world. How? Electricity is the most efficient energy source. By digitizing and connecting electricity to control demand, users can make the most of their energy resulting in increased efficiency, lower costs, and reduced energy waste.
Secure Power is a major contributor in Schneider’s efforts to leverage digital to make the world more sustainable. The new electric world is heavily dependent on data centers due to the explosion in IoT connected devices and the resulting large amounts of data being generated by business and consumer applications. Secure Power’s mission continues to be to make data centers as efficient as possible while ensuring always on availability, without compromising the future of our planet.
Now, data centers have always been powered by electricity and this will not change. With our EcoStruxureTM architecture, we are connecting more devices in the power train, the cooling systems, and in the IT room. By using software to transform the incoming raw data from these connected devices into usable metrics, and by then running analytics to optimize the efficiency and availability of the connected devices, data center owners and operators can benefit from predictive insights, anticipating and preventing failures in their systems. The ability to anticipate when a battery is about to fail or when a circuit breaker is about to trip – which would be catastrophic in a data center – brings increased peace of mind to data center owners and operators as they’re then able to ensure the uptime of their facility for their business and customers.
Building the Sustainable Edge
Efficiency and availability are not exclusive to large data centers and must apply to Edge environments. As the number of IoT connected devices and resulting data continues to increase, we can expect the number of Edge environments to increase exponentially as more compute is required closer to the point of origin or consumption of data. However, the same level of energy efficiency which took 10-15 years to develop and implement in the traditional data center industry is not present in Edge environments today.
Edge environments are plagued by many of the same challenges that faced the data center industry in the past: poor resiliency, lack of remote monitoring and management, lack of standardization and integration, and large number of sites with limited IT staff. Unlike our experience in driving energy efficiency in the data center, we don’t have the luxury of waiting another 10-15 years to drive energy efficiency at the Edge. At Schneider, a key differentiator of our business has been and continues to be our focus on sustainability which is at the core of our strategy. We have been focused on developing connectivity and software solutions at the Edge that will increase both resiliency and efficiency – key enablers of the all-digital, all-electric world we envision. I look forward to expanding further on this topic in upcoming blog posts.
Driving a growth mindset through innovation, diversity, and talent development
I’d like to thank Dave Johnson for his tremendous leadership, and I look forward to partnering closely with him to ensure a smooth transition for our customers and employees. As I move forward in leading the Secure Power Division, I look forward to driving a growth mindset across the business that is shaped by areas that I’m particularly passionate about: innovation, diversity, and talent development.
I am a strong believer that only through continuous innovation can we solve the challenges of our customers, ensuring the resiliency and efficiency of their IT equipment. With diversity of thought gained through hiring and developing the best talent in our industry, I am confident that we have the ingredients needed to achieve our vision of a more sustainable world, powered by the new electric world.
I’m excited to begin this journey and look forward to leading the Secure Power Division into the future.
