Schneider Electric Pushing Partners Toward Software, Services

Energy management and automation company Schneider Electric has made some global headlines this week.

On Monday, the company ousted CEO Peter Herweck over what it described as differences in strategy. In Herweck's place steps Olivier Blum, a 30-year company veteran who heads up Schneider's energy management business.

Then came news that the France-based company had been breached for the third time in a year-and-a-half. A ransomware group known as Hellcat claimed to steal more than 40GB worth of compressed data. And in an odd twist, the malicious hackers wanted $125,000 in baguettes to keep from leaking the information.

"Schneider Electric is investigating a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to one of our internal project execution tracking platforms which is hosted within an isolated environment," the company told The Register in a prepared statement. "Our Global Incident Response team has been immediately mobilized to respond to the incident. Schneider Electric's products and services remain unaffected."

The message in the Schneider Electric channel, however, is brighter, with a growing opportunity for partners to sell software and services, on top of traditional uninterruptible power supply systems and other power and energy management solutions.

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Channel Futures caught up with Gordon Lord, vice president of U.S. channels, Schneider Electric, at last month's Canalys Forum North America in Miami Beach, Florida, to learn about the company's latest approach to the channel, enablement and sales growth.

We've edited the conversation for length and clarity.

Channel Futures: There are number of ways partners can go to market with Schneider Electric.

Schneider Electric's Gordon Lord

Gordon Lord: I would say there are really two areas where we see engagement, and then it will vary by segment, but for the most part, in a hybrid IT environment, there's such a focus on the connectivity. We do a lot with partners, as an attach to networking deployments. So if somebody has …  the network switch that connects their IT environment from what's on-premise to what might be in the cloud, that’s a big focus for us. We have some areas where we're going into that's been very hardware-led, and we're building out programs now so it becomes more than, “attach this UPS to that network switch” to, how can we do it in a more software-led way? So I would say the distributed edge is a real focus for us with partners and it's definitely evolving.

But then the other is the build-out and the modernization of on-premise data centers. We're seeing a lot of repatriating of workloads back from the cloud to on-premise. Years ago, I feel like everybody took a direct turn, putting everything in the cloud. Now we’re seeing a little bit coming back. So it's definitely that modernization of on-premise data centers.

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Read the rest of our Q&A in the slideshow above.