Schneider Electric IT Business is all geared up for the Internet of Things

IoT is transforming the enterprise landscape in ways unthinkable. Technology players are beefing up their IoT strategies to be at the forefront of this transformation. Schneider Electric’s IT Business has its eyes firmly set on the IoT space and is making the right moves. Dataquest interacts with Pankaj Sharma, the IT Business Vice President for Schneider Electric Asia Pacific and Japan, to understand how the company plans to capture the exploding opportunities in the Internet-of-things market.

How is the Internet-of-Things impacting Schneider's IT business?

Over the last few years, businesses have been frontline witnesses to how the Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed the way the global economy functions. IoT has been embedded into almost everything we do, whether it is urban transport, medical devices, automobiles, or household appliances. Terabytes of data are being created, analysed and stored in data centers around the world.

This rapid growth of IoT is can be attributed to a variety of industry developments such as decreasing cost of sensors, embedded systems and devices, growing range of connectivity options and pervasiveness of mobile devices. According to Gartner, data volume is set to grow 800% over the next 5 years and 80% of it will reside as unstructured data that will require more IT engineering and hardware resources. Traditional data center infrastructures, as well as data management and analysis tools, were not built to handle the volume of complex structured and unstructured data that is being generated by connected devices.

With IoT becoming an integral part of a modern business enterprise, how do you see the expectations of your enterprise customers changing and what are the major challenges they are facing today?

The challenges vary from industry to industry. The basic challenge is lack of clarity on IoT, people are still struggling to make a sense out of it. Also, security is a big challenge. For customers in highlycritical banking environment, their data being managed in other country poses a great challenge. Other challenge is related to technology. If the technology one is selling is not IoT ready then that is a massive challenge.

In the Indian context, the availability of adequate internet bandwidth and power is also a major challenge for IoT adoption.

I think they lack clarity about the basic concept of IoT.  IoT being an extremely interesting buzz, everybody needs to acquire it but how does one acquire it for one’s business is something one needs to be clear on. These companies are struggling to find value proposition of IoT in accordance with their business. Many companies are missing out the connection between the business model and the technology and hence are not able to add value to the company.

Please elaborate on what is Schneider Electric’s strategy in the IoT space and how does it plan to help enterprises in their IoT journey?

Schneider’s key interest in Internet of Things (IoT) is to get into a world where information is available for all our customers, suppliers, vendors and all employees in real times. Our basic idea is to start with information. Information that can make life easier for our customers and eventually leads into additional opportunities for Schneider too.

There are various ways and processes to look at IoT. The products Schneider has been selling over the years have capability to be IP enabled. We can put a smart slot inside each one of these products and can get real time information on performance of products from remote locations.

One of big drivers with Schneider is that we are connecting all products that we have sold in so many years, with permission of customers, back to Schneider Electric center. Now, when we connect all these products back to main center, we can provide the customers with information regarding the real efficiency of the product. We can track which product has reached the end of its life cycle, which product is failing frequently. Basically, we can track which product is at which level of efficiency. All of this information is very valuable for the customers who are running companies. It helps the customers decide what they want to do with their infrastructure on a proactive basis, instead of reacting after something goes wrong.