APC names Pacific chief, rebrands StruxureWare

APC by Schneider Electric has appointed 16-year company veteran Paul Tyrer as its Pacific vice president while announcing an expansion and rebranding of its facilities and infrastructure management solutions.

Previously head of the APC’s Britain, Ireland and Nordic businesses and before that channels director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Tyrer will take responsibility for operations in Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific countries from next week.

“At no period in our short history have data centres been more critical to business, yet the industry faces some significant challenges due to rising energy costs and the importance of securing critical power supplies,”  Tyrer said.

Looking to help customers manage these challenges APC has expanded and rebranded its facilities and infrastructure management software which will all be marketed under the umbrella of StruxureWare.

Originally Schneider's brand for building management software, StruxureWare will combines it and APC's portfolio for the monitoring and management of equipment, power, cooling, security and other aspects of data centre management. The two companies merged four years ago.

APC’s Asia director of data centre software Chi Sen Gay said that StruxureWare met demand for energy management to be digitised, which presented opportunities for the channel to reach more customers and develop recurring revenues.

“Our channel will play an increased role,” Gay said. 

He added that the proposed carbon tax would likely provide a big shot in the arm to providers of data centre management solutions.

APC senior vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan Philippe Arsonneau said its channel was key to marketing awareness of StruxureWare and other solutions for data centre management. But he acknowledged the need for more partner training to meet complexities in the market. Partners would get more marketing support, Arsonneau said. 

Gay said that APC continued to mostly serve big data centres for banks and enterprise but that it was seeing more interest from cloud providers seeking to improve efficiency.

A big opportunity was in the area of the "over cooling" of data centres, he said.

Gay said that many data centre managers were acting out of fear and needlessly paying to maintain temperatures well below the thresholds for equipment.

“They are potentially over cooling data centres.”

Although the industry average was about 23 degrees, many data centres could easily run two or even seven degrees warmer, he said; a fact borne out by the growing number of data centre simulations conducted by APC for its customers. 

“There’s a lot of money to be saved but customers are afraid,” Gay said.

“Data centre temperature is a human decision.”