Schneider Electric releases new white paper, tool for informed businesses, technology decisions

Schneider Electric, a digital energy management transformation and automation company, says its newly released “White Paper 281” will boost its customers’ businesses and improve their technology decisions.

Mr Patrick Donovan, Senior Research Analyst, Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Center, said this in a statement on Friday in Lagos.

Donovan said that the paper focuses on morden Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software and the rapidly-changing role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) within the IT world, which had taken center stage in the past few years.

Reports that the paper provides data center operators, channel partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with best practices for the successful deployment of next-generation DCIM within the computing environment.

He said the modern DCIM also addresses CIO management challenges within “Distributed, Hybrid IT Environments” and a supporting Trade Off Tool, which are both available for immediate use.

According to him, the document demonstrates how the success of a CIO is ultimately rooted in a solid foundation of maintaining resilient, secure, and sustainable IT operations.

“In an environment of highly distributed hybrid IT, this goal becomes harder to accomplish.

“Business requirements are forcing CIOs to hybridize their data center and IT portfolio architecture by placing IT capacity in colocation facilities and building out capacity at the local edge – sometimes in a big way,” Donovan said.

He said CIOs had always been tasked with managing, maintaining resilient and secure operations, but generally have been focused on core data center sites.

‘Now, on top of having many more distributed sites needing resiliency and security, they are also being asked to report on the sustainability of their IT operations.

“This marks a real sea change in terms of their responsibilities,” he said.

The analyst said that the 16-page paper focuses on evolution of enterprise IT portfolios and explores the resulting management challenges.

Explaining how modern DCIM software had evolved and optimised for increasingly distributed environments, Donovan said that distributed IT made security a top concern for improved resiliency.

He noted that other concerns included tracking and reporting of the IT operation’s environmental impact.

Also, the TradeOff Tool creator Wendy Torell, a Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Center, said a new Schneider Electric TradeOff Tool and the DCIM Monitoring Value Calculator for Distributed IT, supports the White Paper.

Torell, the creator of TradeOff, said the tool also provides user-selectable inputs and adjustable assumptions to perform “what-if” scenarios to see the Return on Investment (ROI) or payback of monitoring software.

“It considers factors like downtime, staffing, security, and environmental incidents, and cashflow.

“We wanted to create a useful framework to help customers quantify the potential value of DCIM in their operations and we are excited for them to try our tool.

“We designed it to be user friendly and it easily adapts to the customer’s specific environment and level of maturity,” Torell said.