For Dave Johnson, being in charge of Schneider Electric’s crucial IT business is no coincidence; his inherent drive for change and innovation, along with years of industry experience, has given him a profound understanding of how to promote long-term development for the enterprise.
Today, century-old companies that survive must be well-versed in various “strategies” to cope with changes. To secure a place in the market and continuously lead the technological development and trends of the industry, they must rely on keen market insight and be willing to accept challenges, adapting tactics to reap rewards rather than passively conforming to and adapting to new environments.
As the Global Executive Vice President of Schneider Electric’s IT Business Unit, Dave Johnson has worked at Schneider Electric for over a decade, holding various leadership positions in IT-related fields and accumulating rich industry experience. For example, in the cabinet business he once oversaw, which included traditional cabinets and rack-mounted power distribution products, the initial scale was very small. However, through innovative transformation of the rack product line into foundational modules for data center solutions, and continuously optimizing the supply chain and channel empowerment to shorten customer delivery times with integrated cabinet solutions, the cabinet business has now become one of Schneider Electric’s top business clusters in the global market. As he firmly occupies the number one market share in the global data center business, in the face of today’s constantly disruptive innovative technologies and challenging market environment, Dave Johnson hopes to lead his team to continue to embody the spirit of innovation and change, perfectly showcasing new miracles in the digital age.
Keen Insight Arises from Market Accumulation
In the context of the rapid development of the Internet and the Internet of Things, the computing ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex. Schneider Electric has keenly observed the significant trend of enterprise-level data center customers transitioning towards cloud and managed data centers, as well as the enormous business opportunities brought by edge computing in distributed IT environments. Leveraging Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxureTM innovative architecture and platform, Dave Johnson will lead the team to provide customers with comprehensive physical infrastructure and full lifecycle services, from interconnected products to edge control, applications, analytics, and services.
It is well-known that the Internet of Things will generate explosive amounts of data. According to authoritative statistics, by 2020, 30 billion sensors will connect devices to the network, 4 billion people will be interconnected, resulting in 50 trillion GB of data. The data collected by such a vast number of devices and sensors faces significant challenges during transmission and processing. In fields such as artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, data needs to be analyzed, processed, and stored at the network edge. Based on this trend, Schneider Electric has launched a series of innovative products to meet customer demands for flexibility, ease of deployment, and high availability.
Focusing on the cloud hosting market that Schneider Electric is strategically targeting, Dave Johnson believes: “The traditional model of building or upgrading local data centers no longer has outstanding advantages in cost management, uptime, and performance; managed services are becoming the trend, with more and more enterprises adopting hosting services.”
Regarding the data center hosting market in China, Dave Johnson sees three opportunities that differentiate it from the global market and are favorable for Schneider Electric’s layout: first, the Chinese government provides substantial support for the Internet and cloud computing markets; second, Internet giants like BAT share some technologies while competing, thus accelerating industry development; and finally, the Chinese hosting data center market is very vibrant, with new hosting data centers and investments continuously increasing.
“As an industry leader, Schneider Electric will not miss these opportunities,” Dave Johnson stated. On the product level, Schneider Electric has a dedicated development team guided by the principle of “China for China” to customize solutions for specific local needs. On the business level, Schneider Electric is strengthening its focus on overall delivery rather than individual products. To this end, Schneider Electric’s project execution center has restructured the sales team for cloud and managed data centers to transition from individual sales to large-scale data center solution sales.
“Correspondingly, we have also enhanced the overall capabilities of our supply chain in terms of individual product delivery, installation, maintenance, and operations. From a full lifecycle perspective, we provide integrated solutions that include products, solutions, and services for cloud and Internet customers,” Dave Johnson stated.
Innovative Layout Drives Sustainable Development
At Schneider Electric’s 2017 Innovation Summit, the EcoStruxure architecture and platform were grandly launched as the cornerstone of Schneider Electric’s digital transformation, and a series of innovations surrounding this platform have demonstrated the company’s true commitment to keeping pace with the times and comprehensive innovation.
“Based on the EcoStruxure architecture and platform, we can provide customers with scalable, IoT-based solutions, driving comprehensive innovation across three levels: interconnected products, edge control, and applications, analytics, and services.” In relation to the data center business, Dave Johnson believes that EcoStruxure fully leverages Schneider Electric’s deep expertise in power distribution, IT, and buildings, helping customers quickly build truly interconnected, highly available, and secure data centers with efficient operational management.
For example, at the interconnected product layer, based on EcoStruxure, Schneider Electric can provide customers with core products ranging from medium and low voltage equipment to IT space facilities, and with integrated, standardized, modular, and prefabricated overall solutions, help customers build the most predictable and highly available green data centers. At the edge control layer, efficient local operations, control, and management of data centers can be achieved by providing various data center-related software or intelligent operation modules. At the application, analytics, and services layer, cloud-based applications and services will optimize data and information analysis, as well as remote data-driven digital services, assisting enterprise managers in building decision-making analysis systems in the era of big data.
In Dave Johnson’s view, the three-layer architecture of EcoStruxure is like a wise layout, with continuous innovation giving Schneider Electric greater vitality. “We continuously provide high energy efficiency and high availability products for data centers and other critical environments.” Dave Johnson cited the Galaxy V series UPS, which offers high energy efficiency, high reliability, and scalable power protection solutions for large and super-large data centers, and can be easily and efficiently integrated into the EcoStruxure platform for remote monitoring and management. Additionally, the Galaxy VX is the first UPS to offer lithium-ion battery storage options, providing customers with numerous benefits, including reduced carbon footprint, extended battery life, reduced maintenance, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Currently, the Galaxy VX has been successfully implemented in several commercial applications, such as the three ultra-large ecological data centers of Hengyun Tai, which have deployed 44 Galaxy VX series UPS units, marking the largest installation of Galaxy VX globally.
At Schneider Electric’s 2017 Innovation Summit in Shanghai, Schneider Electric also showcased a latest modular data center integrated machine developed by the C4C team. “This product includes the infrastructure required for data centers, such as cabinets, UPS, and cooling, and can monitor the operational status of all components in the micro data center at any time through a monitoring screen, and can also connect to the cloud for remote management operations. This micro data center solution covers integrated solutions for small and micro data centers ranging from a single cabinet to ten cabinets, making it particularly suitable for retail stores and even some small and medium-sized bank offices.” Dave Johnson expressed excitement for the innovations of the Chinese team, stating that Schneider Electric will provide more support to the C4C team in the future to achieve digital transformation in the Chinese market.