Schneider Electric Provides Partners ‘Gateway’ To Capture Infrastructure IT Spend

‘What this does is it really starts to build pipeline for the partners,’ said Schneider Electric channel chief Gordon Lord. ‘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.’

Schneider Electric is rolling out Gateway, a new part of its partner program to help resellers and integrators capture the massive spend that is headed towards data center and on-premises infrastructure as organizations build out capabilities to meet the AI era.

Schneider Electric’s Gateway program gives partners access to training, free licenses and enablement for EcoStruxure IT, a cloud-based power assessment tool that has been designed to help partners connect with prospects and customers, said Schneider Electric Vice President of U.S. Channels Gordon Lord (pictured above).

“We look at the age of the UPS. What age are the batteries? When was the last time they were deployed?” said Lord. “The nice thing is the partner has a reason to call them. Not to sell them anything, but to say ‘Hey, my partner here Schneider Electric has this free assessment that I’d love to come talk to about.’ It’s helping them understand what their power infrastructure looks like. If they have a network upgrade coming, are they ready for it?”

Once partners sign up for Gateway, they can use EcoStruxure IT to run a full UPS Health Assessment that delivers an overall score with specific recommendations to optimize performance, identify outdated firmware and vulnerable configurations to improve security, quantify avoided downtime and actual downtime, as well as measure Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and power consumption to reduce cost and carbon footprint.

[RELATED: Schneider Electric Launches Global AI Ecosystem Organization To Help Partners Capture AI Opportunit y]

Through Gateway, partners will have access to enablement and training, Schneider Electric’s own in-house experts for support, as well as licenses reimbursement at the higher levels of its partner program.

“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,” said Lord. “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.”

It is also a path for the partner to cross-sell their other value-added solutions, said Lord. “The managed service experts from the partner come in and utilize that as a foot in the door to start talking about, ‘Boy, we can not only sell you the hardware, software and services here, but we could sell this as a managed service,’” Lord said. “So it's a door-opener.”

Schneider Electric is publicly traded in Europe. During the first half of the year, it posted $22.5 billion in revenue with growth of 8 percent and adjusted net income of $2.57 billion dollars. During a July 31 conference call, Schneider Electric said based on its pipeline, it has an opportunity to bring in double-digit growth in data center this year and sees a robust market for infrastructure overall.

“That confirms really a pretty strong positioning for Schneider Electric and a good confidence to deliver really good medium- and long-term growth as a company,” Schneider Electric CEO Olivier Blum said during the call. “We want to be the global energy tech partner of our customer. We believe we have a unique portfolio, unique technology to help our customers to electrify, automate and digitalize home, industries and buildings.”

Harrisburg, Pa.-based D&H Distributing has seen massive growth in sales of its infrastructure lineup, which includes Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo, as well as Schneider Electric, Eaton, and Vertiv products.

D&H Distributing Senior Vice President of Modern Solutions Business Unit Jason Bystrak told CRN he has talked with Schneider Electric about the Gateway program, which he sees as a way for partners to win deals now and remain sticky with customers down the road.

“We’re super excited about the Gateway program,” Bystrack told CRN. “It’s a way to go out and offer an assessment service that really looks at all of your infrastructure from a power standpoint. It’s vendor-agnostic to be able to see exactly what you have out there. It helps clean up and understand it. That may lead to new hardware opportunities to refresh your infrastructure.”

Bystrak said Schneider Electric is also offering partners free licenses and incentives to enable them to be aggressive about winning deals, which he views as an effective way for partners to land power business and expand into managed power as a service.

“I think the really smart partners are going to take advantage of that to move into a managed power offering, especially the MSP community, which is where we’re trying to position to help partners do it,” Bystrak told CRN. “MSPs then can use that software to deliver ongoing managed services around power to optimize the environment for that. ‘Let's get a management solution in place to do that on an ongoing basis. And by the way, why don't I add that to your managed services agreement’ So we're definitely positioning this and seeing good interest.”

D&H Distributing can also run the management of the service for partners who either don’t have the expertise or staff to run it within their own shops, Bystrak told CRN.

D&H Distributing has seen “massive growth” of well over 200 percent in its data center infrastructure business this year, and the power portion of that is up 20 percent. He said given the pick-up in sales around IT infrastructure, the opportunity for partners is huge.

“Power is super exciting again,” he said. “And in addition to power, just think about the liquid cooling. Because when you are doing more high-density compute, especially when you get into GPUs, the cooling piece of it becomes really important decision too … You have to optimize the power, back it up, and you have to cool it.”

Early work with the program among channel partners has been very successful, Schneider Electric’s Lord said.

“We’ve had partners look at us in the past as just a hardware vendor, and now they look at it and say, ‘You are even more relevant today. You guys just helped me get into two net-new customers with this assessment,’” Lord said. “Now, not only are they selling a new category from Schneider in terms of software, but then they see that hardware pull-through in support of a new network upgrade, or they start looking at readiness around building their own on-premises data center.”