Partners: Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Helps Win New Customers And Build Margin

‘Whether they’re budgeting for replacements of the gear — if it’s a brownfield situation — or they’re planning expansions into a greenfield situation, it’s great. It really is a win-win all around,’ Wayne St. Jacques, vice president of managed and executive services at Herndon, Va.-based ePlus, tells CRN

Schneider Electric partners told CRN that the company’s battery management software EcoStruxture is helping their business win new logos, become sticky with existing customers and it’s delivering returns through the partner program.

Ron Boscaccy, vice president of licensing and lifecycle practice at Downers Grove, Ill.-based Sentinel Technologies, called battery and backup the “quiet hero” that businesses need during a disruption. He said Schneider has created a program that gives solution providers a way to help business monitor and manage battery and back up.

“So with this new EcoStruxure that came out — and we’re even developing our own management services around it — it’s the ability to go in and monitor, see what’s going on with the batteries, validate that they’re still good, and then also check a bunch of other settings in there: temperature settings, load settings, and everything else we can capture, and we can then be even more alerting to the customer when issue problems arise,” he told CRN.

Schneider Electric last month announced Gateway, a new part of its partner program that gives partners access to training, free licenses and enablement for EcoStruxure IT, a cloud-based power assessment, Schneider Electric Vice President of U.S. Channels Gordon Lord told CRN.

“The biggest thing we’re trying to do is this idea of engaging customers in a different way and helping our partners do that. What this does is it really starts to build pipeline for the partners,” Lord told CRN. “Then we tie it in on the back end with program incentives. It’s not just a program that we’re bringing partners. It’s really a reason to call customers.”

Wayne St. Jacques, vice president of managed and executive services at Herndon, Va.-based ePlus, told CRN that his business helped Schneider develop the solution building on the idea that “every customer hates when the red light comes on” and business stops.

“You can’t have interrupted power. You need uninterrupted power because you have processes that run your workloads that run 24/7 but no one likes dealing with the issue, the headache, replacing batteries, end of life, end of support,” he said.

EcoStruxure pulls the battery management information into a dashboard that includes contract information, when batteries may need to be replaced, downtime, and he said ePlus uses that as a supplement to its other managed service offerings.

“We can get to a predictive analysis to say, ‘Hey, you know, you have 20 percent or 10 percent left on this battery,’ or ‘You’ve had this many issues with the battery. We need to replace it,’” St. Jacques (pictured above) told CRN. “And so if we need to, we dispatch through Schneider, and we have folks that are Schneider certified in geo(graphy) that go on site and replace the battery. And all this is for a little more a month.”

At Sentinel Technologies, Boscaccy said sales teams have won new business after calling prospects to offer a free EcoStruxure evaluation.

“Most times these guys are calling in and they’re pitching what? Security, networking, telephony, right? Who’s really calling in about their UPS,” he told CRN. “It does open the door right away. I mean, I’ve seen already where one of our customers that we started talking to really had nothing to do with Sentinel, no business, no nothing. We brought in the APC talk about EcoStruxure, and got a phone call. We’re able to start talking about the rest of stuff that we do on top of that, which was really nice.”

He said while the free power and battery assessments have been a great way to engage new customers, Schneider has also invested their personnel into helping partners win opportunities with an “all hands on deck approach.”

“The nice thing about that is when we do a call into the customer, they’re side by side with us on those calls,” Boscaccy said. “Here you have the manufacturer coming in to back their software, back the hardware and that’s really powerful. I think that’s why we’re seeing so much success with this, is that it’s a dual partnership.”

St. Jacques said Schneider is one of his favorite vendors in the channel because they are extremely flexible, and collaborative with their partners. He said once ePlus started using EcoStruxure IT with customers, there were pivots that needed to happen, and Schneider backed them up each time.

“The great thing is whether it’s pricing, whether it’s capability, whether it’s asking for enhancements or details that may or may not exist in the product, and that kind of thing, they’ve been very receptive,” he told CRN. “They’ve really put some, put some cycles behind their responses and so I can definitely say they’re all in with us.”

St. Jacques said for the partner it means winning recurring service revenue, as well as demonstrating thought leadership in getting ahead of a customer’s problem and preventing downtime. And while Schneider has also layered in financial incentives for partners, the customer reaction is where he is looking for profitability.

“It’s a value that the customers can very quickly see. It’s very tangible to them, where they’re like, ‘Oh, wait, this is something we no longer have to run around and do?’” he said. “I think it’s a great tool to seed the decision-making for folks. Whether they’re budgeting for replacements of the gear, if it’s a brownfield situation or they’re planning expansions into a greenfield situation, it’s great. It really is a win all around.”