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It was a busy 2022 for those of us in product development as we rallied around a new purpose and vision: to empower customers with Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT portfolio of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software to operate IT infrastructure that is resilient, secure, and sustainable.
We witnessed the full importance of distributed IT with more assets and the growing need for remote management where every endpoint is critical and everything is considered a data center. We call this new trend DCIM 3.0, and we are driving our vision for it by supporting our on-premise products and creating new functionality to suit the needs of our expanding user community. EcoStruxure IT will help our customers solve many of the challenges they are experiencing from this latest evolution in DCIM.
As we move into 2023, we will continue to work toward our vision for the EcoStruxure IT portfolio with these focus points:
- Committed to both on-premises and cloud solutions for our products. A key challenge our customers face with DCIM 3.0 is how to manage the hybrid IT environment. We see the need for having solutions both on-premises and cloud hosted and are moving forward on both fronts.
- Creating a connected portfolio. We are excited to be taking products that have a tradition of being siloed and breaking out of that mindset by having them work together seamlessly, as a connected portfolio.
- Focused on cybersecurity and protecting our customer’s entire attack surface. A growing trend is the need for more cybersecurity resiliency.
Monitoring and Management
IT Expert underwent tremendous evolution last year and experienced growth that far surpassed our expectations. As IT Expert was incepted as a fantastic tool for edge monitoring and management, we have now built out a compelling story with several enhancements for enterprise businesses. We have focused on making IT Expert a more useful tool for enterprise-size customers with better alarm management and reports. Recently, we have released data history for up to four years, a new notification policy management, and Rack PDU outlet control, to mention a few.
As the IT infrastructures of our customers become more complex, we enable our partners via our Partner portal, which has been improved with the release of the Partner mobile app and added administrator functionality in the web. Now our service partners can provide services for customers using our cloud platform.
Data Center Expert went into 2022 with a renewed emphasis for on-premises monitoring and management to support our customers no matter where they are in their DCIM journey. Cybersecurity was the prime focus as more of our customers are developing in-house standards for network communication and physical appliances introduced into their infrastructure. We are making an intense effort to increase development to continue keeping Data Center Expert secure, adding a robust and modern API, and bringing the UX/UI to current design standards.
NetBotz continues to be a major focus as customer security is of the utmost importance and a sound cybersecurity approach needs to include physical security, as physical security is cybersecurity. We released 5.3.4 version of the NetBotz 5 software platform, which not only included some stability and performance improvements, it added new features like mass configuration and multiple trap receivers. For the NetBotz 250 platform, we released version 7.0.6, which included many security fixes as well as feature improvements. We released a new version of the Wireless Update Utility so customers using NetBotz wireless sensors would be able to upgrade their firmware to the latest and greatest stable release. All of this is enabling our customers to enhance their resiliency and security with the use of NetBotz in their IT environments.
Planning and Modeling
In 2022, we added new features and enhancements in IT Advisor to help manage data centers and colocation facilities and make better use of resources and energy they consume. This effort featured improvements to network cabling with a comprehensive model for network cable routing across a data center room. And it included the ability to get estimates on the cable length, greatly simplifying the networking management that can consume countless hours from data center management teams.
The Energy Efficiency module was introduced, making it possible to see power usage effectiveness (PUE), subsystem cost, and CO2 emissions from multiple sites, contributing more tools customers can use to support their sustainability initiatives.
Our team is continuing to focus on developing and modernizing IT Advisor. We’re working on making IT Advisor more resilient by enhancing the security and framework in the desktop and in the web client, which will support the future development of IT Advisor. We will continue to transfer features from desktop to the Web client with focus on creating a coherent user experience for our customers in both instances of IT Advisor.
Delivering on our vision
As I said, it was a busy 2022 for those of us in product development! And this year has been no different as our team continues to deliver on our EcoStruxure IT promise of modernizing DCIM and our vision of empowering customers to operate the most resilient, secure, and sustainable IT infrastructure anywhere.
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