INTERVIEW
Critical
infrastructure
By Marc Garner, Vice President,
IT Division, Schneider Electric
UK & Ireland
www.schneider-electric.co.uk
Marc Garner from Schneider Electric
discusses what the future may hold
for the data centre industry
Schneider Electric is a specialist in digital transformation of
energy management and automation; in homes, buildings,
data centres and industry. In February 2007, Schneider
Electric acquired the APC and MGE UPS Systems brands.
Since its incorporation in March 1981, APC has evolved
from a product leader in critical power protection to a global
product and solutions leader in critical power and cooling,
serving the residential, data centre, edge computing,
buildings and industrial markets.
What have been the most significant changes to
the industry over the past five years?
During the last five years we’ve seen the era of edge
really become established, which has meant that due to
challenges of latency, application availability and prolific
data generation, businesses have begun to deploy more on-
premise and distributed IT environments. This brings with it
the complex challenges of uptime and management.
One can’t for example, have a maintenance specialist
on-site at every location, so collaboration among vendors
and pre-integration, in addition to the use of cloud-based
management software, have become crucial to ensuring
minimal downtime for today’s customers.
Additionally, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of
hyperscale, cloud and colocation service providers, with an
increased move towards outsourced data centre services,
which has led to growth within the multi-tenant data centre
(MTDC) market.
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What are the main challenges for your sector?
Rather than focus on the challenges of the sector,
I think one of the biggest challenges has really been a
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