Sustainability is a “business imperative”
Mr. Mehmet Saglam, Cluster Vice President Secure Power and Digital Energy at Schneider Electric, talks to Engineering Post about Sustainability, digitization and his company’s efforts to streamline operations and increase efficiency. Read his exclusive interview to Engineering Post below.
Schneider Electric is leading the digital transformation of energy management and automation in homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries. With a global presence in over 100 countries, Schneider is the indisputable leader in power management – medium voltage, low voltage and secure power, and in automation systems.
Recently Mr. Mehmet Saglam, Cluster Vice President Secure Power & Digital Energy, Schneider Electric visited Pakistan for the first time. During an exclusive discussion with Engineering Post, Mr. Mehmet said that Digital transformation is a business imperative in today’s competitive environment. To meet the needs of today’s digital world, Schneider Electric is transforming how our customers deploy and manage their IT infrastructure. We power the data centers of the future which are more sustainable, efficient, adaptive and resilient, whether in the cloud or at the edge.
He further added that Pakistan is an attractive market for Schneider Electric. We see an interesting trend here, the digital transformation is definitely riding high on this growth and we feel there is a great opportunity for us here, right now, and in the future.
Sharing his views on Sustainability he added, “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. Our mission continues to be to make data centers as efficient as possible while ensuring always on availability, without compromising the future of our planet.
I believe that now it’s more important than ever to have resilient IT operations, protect critical data and reduce any environmental impact from digital technologies. EcoStruxure™ IT, our next-generation data center infrastructure software monitors the data centers and hybrid IT locations, making operations more sustainable, efficient and scalable, ensuring remote visibility and flexibility wherever you are. We enable the accelerated pace of digital transformation by ensuring resilient data compute and storage exactly where and when it is needed – providing in-depth visibility into distributed IT networks, while leveraging data analytics and AI and machine learning technologies to drive predictive data center operations.
Schneider Electric has inaugurated first-of-its-kind APC retail store in Pakistan. Sharing his thoughts at the inauguration of the APC store, Mr. Mehmet said, “This retail store is an endeavor to further strengthen our presence in the segment and provide easier access of our products to our customers. We look forward to connecting with our customers in a better way by giving them in-person experience of our offerings. What we have created here is a complete platform where customers can experience APC’s full range of products and solutions.
Sharing his feedback on the full portfolio of products to address the needs of Pakistani market he said, “I’m glad that we have a full portfolio of products to address the local market needs, as our 3 phase UPS range has just been refreshed with lots of new technology products such as the Galaxy VL Series with LI-ION batteries and high efficiency. Services is also an important segment, which showed growth, as many customers tried to refresh their installed base to be at right level of availability and functionality.”
Moreover, our latest addition in our 1 phase product portfolio helped us deliver best in class, easy to use, maintain and monitor the UPSs while delivering secure power to the critical equipment, either to the SMEs or to the professionals working from home. Thanks to our complete range of UPSs, the added value our customers received through our EcoStruxure IT solutions and the professional services we have provided, we saw a soaring interest in these products in the past year. This sets up even greater expectations for this year.
To meet the need for more efficient edge infrastructure, Schneider Electric also announced the expansion of its EcoStruxure Micro Data Center C-Series. This provides intelligent cooling technology and helps dispose of the need for a purpose-built IT room, with the potential to cut capex by almost half and boost time to market.
If we talk about large corporate clients, data center clients, over the past years, we have developed a full ecosystem that allows people to manage and maintain their data center operations remotely – EcoStruxure IT delivers cloud-based management and analytics enabling users to prevent downtime. The software and digital services are built on an open, next-generation platform, that is vendor agnostic, enabling IT professionals to optimize the management of edge computing sites by reducing cost to service and mitigating risk while improving availability.
We are coming with lots of options for this kind of hybrid way of working, as most of our products are connected, which mean that can be managed or monitored remotely. All these solutions offer high-speed reactions on-premise but also remote, improving efficiency and increasing availability. Today, edge environments are overwhelmed 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. 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.
