Partnering Delivers Energy Management More Efficiently, With Less Risk

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Schneider Electric has long been committed to the idea of energy efficiency – that’s what many of our products are all about. But we’ve also been around long enough to realize that creating real, lasting energy efficiency is a big and complex job for any single company to tackle alone.

That’s why Schneider Electric has also long been committed to the idea of alliances and partnering. Alistair Pim, Schneider’s VP of Global Strategic Alliances, recently wrote about some awards his team won from the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP).  As he wrote:

That should give customers peace of mind that when we come in with a joint proposal with one of our partners, you can be assured we’ll work together effectively and ultimately deliver a project that neither of us could’ve executed as well (or at all) on our own. That’s the whole idea behind alliances: to create value together beyond what any one partner can deliver alone.

I couldn’t agree more with Alistair but wanted to add a bit of my own perspective regarding the value of partnerships.

First, any new technology endeavor involves some amount of risk, often involving components from different vendors that don’t play nice together. This is just a fact of life in any complex industrial project but it’s one that can be mitigated through vendor partnerships. When vendors do the heavy lifting of pre-testing and validating that their products integrate well with one another, it spares the end customer from that time and effort – while simultaneously reducing their risk of failure.

Additionally, when components are integrated ahead of time, such as through Web services, it reduces engineering and execution risks as compared to integrating in the field.

When vendors work together, they may even develop some features that differentiate their integrated offering from what competitors offer.

These kinds of partnerships and integrations are especially important to Schneider Electric with respect to our EcoStruxure integrated hardware and software system architecture and StruxureWare software applications and suites. These offerings are about providing simplified, energy efficient factories, data centers and buildings. And the more we can tie in third party hardware and software, such that we can manage it along with our own products, the more we can deliver even greater energy efficiency.

You’ll be hearing more about these themes in the coming weeks and months as Schneider Electric launches its EcoStruxure Technology Partner Program. Through the program, partners such as Cisco, Intel and OSIsoft will all be working together to improve energy efficiency not just in the data center but across all critical business domains, enhancing efficiency and productivity from the factory floor to the executive suite. At the same time, we’ll be working to ensure faster project deployment with less risk for you, the customer.