Tech Insights: Interview with Francois Vazille, Schneider Electric

In our new Tech Insights series, we quiz industry leaders to get their views of what the year ahead holds for the IT world. Today we speak with Francois Vazille, Vice President, IT Business, Schneider Electric.

What do you see as the single biggest challenge facing the ICT industry in the year ahead, and why?

The biggest challenge facing the ICT industry next year is to understand the best possible solutions available - is it cloud, hybrid cloud or ‘legacy IT’? Businesses will need to define what applications or workloads should be moved to an outsourced model and which ones should remain ‘on premise’. While ICT consumers are struggling to transition to a possible new architecture, they also have the greatest opportunity to evaluate the benefits of each solution for their business.

What do you see as the two or three biggest growth opportunities for your customers in 2015, and why?

The opportunity for our partners is in assisting the end users to define and implement a hybrid IT solution that leverages all the available technologies. Delivering an integrated solution provides end users with a competitive advantage. Partners need to provide thought leadership and guidance, while ICT needs to be an enabler, and a point of differentiation for businesses.

In addition, customers are increasingly aware of their need to be energy-efficient due to social, environmental and financial reasons. Energy efficiency is not just about saving on the monthly electricity and other energy bills, but also about understanding how organisations can be more effective with their total energy. They need to measure productivity gains and be proactive with their energy programs in the future.

What new and innovative technologies do you see emerging in your IT solution categories in 2015, and how will they help your customers?

Prefabricated modular data centres will certainly grow in popularity over the next 12 to 24 months across many market segments. Consumers can take advantage of standardised, pre-assembled and integrated data centre modules to leverage a 30% cost reduction and 60% time-to-deployment reduction over traditional data centre infrastructure. This will help organisations to be more agile in their ICT deployments and significantly reduce risk associated with one-time engineered bricks and mortar solutions.

A prefab data centre is made up of at least one pre-engineered, factory-integrated and pre-tested assembly of subsystems that have traditionally been installed separately on-site and mounted on a skid or in an enclosure.

In addition, data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) software provides a complete picture of the health of a data centre and is designed to identify and resolve data centre issues. It increases understanding of capacity and utilisation in the environment through monitoring and controlling data centre physical infrastructure (DCPI) in real time and based on changing loads.

DCIM can also help identify unused or stranded capacity by coordinating assets more efficiently and conducting predictive analysis of what will happen to the physical infrastructure before loads are moved.

Francois Vazille is Vice President, IT Business, for Schneider Electric. Previously he spent close to 14 years at IBM ANZ in various positions including managing the small- to medium-sized business and storage business. Before IBM, Francois worked in SAGEM Australia and France. He has been in Australia for over 16 years and has a Bachelor of Commerce and Marketing from Institut superieur du commerce de Paris.