Schneider Electric increases options for MSPs

The growth in popularity of edge computing over the past 18 months has been a boon for those selling power solutions and the next stage of that process is to make it easier for managed service providers to add the monitoring of distributed IT to their portfolio.

That has been the conclusion that Schneider Electric has reached with the firm making its EcoStruxure IT management solution available to European channel partners.

In a nutshell the offering gives MSPs the chance to monitor and maintain power systems as well as adding other services on top of what is a vendor neutral platform.

Kim Povlsen, vice president of digital services & data centre software, Schneider Electric, said that it would give partners the chance to make more revenue from customers and increase the depth of their relationship.

“It’s a game changing opportunity for partners to strengthen their customer relationships by delivering insight into the functioning and efficiency of compute facilities, while offering higher availability and potentially lowered service costs as new capabilities are added through EcoStruxure IT for Partners," he said.

He added that it had been providing on-prem management but it needed to do more given the changing nature of the market and the rise of distributed IT and edge computing.

Schneider has been piloting the scheme for more than six months and been working closely with the channel to ensure that the approach it finally took met the demands of customers and the needs of resellers.

Rob McKernan, senior vice president, ITD Europe & Global IT Channels at APC, said that the firm had developed its own management suite over the past few years and this move would unlock that for partners.

"More partners are becoming managed service providers and this will allow the partners to offer more value," he added "Edge computing has arrived...sales are increasing rapidly."