APC By Schneider Electric 'Getting Louder' About Software, New Cloud Solutions To Drive Channel Growth

APC by Schneider Electric wants partners to know that its focus this year is around driving new software capabilities for the channel and creating more cloud-based versions of legacy product lines.

"What we're getting louder about is our software capabilities, and our monitoring and management strategy, and taking that to the cloud, and taking that to channel partners," said Katie Boeh, director of channel marketing and communications at APC at XChange Solution Provider 2018.

The West Kingston, R.I.-based data center specialist will continue to launch cloud-based versions in 2018 for its existing infrastructure management software capabilities. APC's new software suite, dubbed EcoStruxure, is an Internet of Things-enabled, interoperable architecture made for businesses, data center and a variety of vertical industries.

[Related: APC Making Channel Investments In IoT, Managed Services To Drive Partner Profitability]

"It's a cloud strategy that will enable partners to really get rid of that barrier to entry. It's a lower cost model. It will be multi-tenancy so they can see everything that's happening with their customer's environments, whether it’s a data center, distributed IT or a hybrid IT system," said Boeh.

APC is also focusing this year on channel initiatives around the edge, managed services, and system integration. The edge and IoT is a critical market for APC's push to provide micro data centers.

"Compute and storage are coming outside of the data center into more distributed environments – so remote office, branch office, access points – we're seeing that more and more because of things like IoT and because of latency challenges and bandwidth challenges or data sovereignty," said Boeh. "There's a real need outside of just the data center in those distributed environments to have that data center-like resiliency … in those edge environments."