Schneider Electric Gives Channel Partners New UPS Battery Upgrade, Services Opportunities

Schneider Electric’s new APC Smart-UPS supports low-cost lead-acid batteries and longer-lasting lithium-ion batteries, giving customers an upgrade path for future battery chemistries and partners a way to build new services around distributed power infrastructure.

Schneider Electric Monday unveiled its next-generation APC Smart-UPS, which brings what the company says is the first multi-chemistry battery technology to distributed and edge environments.

Debuting at this week’s XChange August 2026 conference in National Harbor, Md., the APC Smart-UPS works with both VRLA (valve regulated lead-acid) or sealed lead-acid batteries and the more modern lithium-ion batteries, allowing customers to start with the lower-cost VRLA technology but later upgrade to lithium-ion batteries. XChange is being hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

Adam Compton, offer management leader at Schneider Electric, said current UPS systems use either VRLA or lithium-ion batteries, and until now customers had to choose one technology or the other.

“When doing a refresh, customers had to buy VRLA or lithium-ion, and they were locked into that technology,” Compton told CRN. “The promise of this new platform moving forward is that you can buy one type of battery chemistry, say it’s VRLA, and then when it comes [time] to refresh that battery, you can actually replace it with a lithium-ion battery without changing the chassis.”

As newer battery chemistries become available, Schneider Electric will also incorporate them as a battery upgrade option, Compton said.

“As new chemistries come online and are made viable and feasible, safe, sustainable, etc., and have a solid value proposition for the market, Schneider Electric will be at the leading edge of that, I’m sure,” he said. “And when we do that, battery chemistry XYZ will also be something that you can put into the same chassis. It will have a battery management system. The chassis will be able to recognize it and know if it was VRLA or lithium-ion or some battery chemistry to be named later.”

The new technology provides increased flexibility for channel partners, Compton said. Customers looking at a new UPS system but have budget constraints can order the new system with VRLA batteries, which have a life span of maybe three to five years, and then when the batteries need refreshing purchase lithium-ion batteries, which last eight to 10 years, he said.

“Partners offering customer assessments and planning help can go in and take out that VRLA battery and put in lithium-ion, and now the customers literally have the very best UPS and the very best battery chemistry to go with it,” he said. “They are future-proofing on the idea that if in those three to five years there’s a new battery chemistry from Schneider Electric, and they worry about having to replace their old UPS to get this new battery chemistry, now they don’t have to. Now they can simply buy an RBC [replacement battery cartridge].”

The new Smart-UPS models have been engineered to accept either VRLA or lithium-ion batteries, which have different sizes, weights and power characteristics, Compton said.

“While there’s been a lot that has gone into the engineering of the hardware itself, along with the firmware and battery, management systems are going to be critical here,” he said. “When you switch from a VRLA that has a three- to five-year life cycle to a lithium- ion in the same chassis, the firmware, the software, the battery management system, all those soft features have to recognize that. Switching to a new battery chemistry sends alerts to tell EcoStruxure ITE, which is the monitoring software sitting on top of this, that that isn’t a VRLA battery that needs to be replaced in three to five years. This is a lithium-ion battery that needs to be replaced in eight to 10 years.”

Base For New Services: CDW

The ability to use multiple battery technologies in a single UPS chassis is very important to the customer base of CDW, ranked No. 5 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500, said Mark Santaromita, business development manager at the Vernon Hills, Ill.-based solution provider and Schneider Electric channel partner.

A lot of customers want the “Ferrari” of UPSes but can only afford the “Toyota,” Santaromita told CRN.

“For our customer base, that means buying the lead-acid model, and then hopefully in the future they can afford the better model,” he said. “With the new multi-chemistry units, you’re effectively buying a chassis that can accept both and when you’re ready to scale, you can.”

UPS batteries work more like an operating expenditure than a capital expenditure, Santaromita said.

“The lead-acid battery will last anywhere from three to five years,” he said. “These new lithium batteries last closer to eight to 10 years. So within a 10-year life cycle, you effectively halved if not reduced operating costs by two-thirds with lithium. Adopting a new lithium battery will end up being cheaper than purchasing an entire new lead-acid unit at the time.”

Monitoring battery life is a good area on which to build a service, Santaromita said.

“Schneider’s software portfolio with their EcoStruxure IT Expert is a great way to drive life-cycle services,” he said. “When we’re able to do complete life-cycle management on critical infrastructure like power and cooling, it fuels the conversation not only for Schneider, but for CDW as a whole and for other services we can provide via other partners.”

Part Of A Wider Range Of Services

One of Schneider Electric’s big channel priorities is giving its channel partners a reason to engage customers, said Gordon Lord, vice president of channels for the company.

Toward that end, the company about two years ago started utilizing some of its software to look at the distributed environment UPSes that are in the installed base of partners’ customers, he said.

“That’s our Gateway program where essentially we’re putting a software appliance on the network to look at all the UPSes and PDUs customers might have in their infrastructure,” he said. “We continue to double down on that. We’re also helping partners engage their customers in a differentiated way by leading with services.”

Schneider Electric also has an offer called Rip-Replace-Recycle to help partners engage customers on a technology refresh cycle to help them upgrade to newer technologies in a sustainable way, Lord said.

One of the big challenges customers have is what to do with the battery when upgrading their UPS, Lord said. The company offers a service for disposing of old batteries in a meaningful and responsible way while providing partners with incentives to help customers upgrade to newer technologies, he said.

This includes making an appliance available on customers’ infrastructure to give visibility to all their UPSes and PDUs, whether from Schneider Electric or not, so they know the health of their batteries, Lord said.

“With a UPS, you’re typically looking at least at a 10-year life cycle,” he said. “We give visibility to an IT manager that might be responsible for maybe a small school district with six buildings and three network closets in each one. Rather than having to go around to each network closet to look at the health of the UPS, they can do that through this assessment, and we enable them to do that.”

Schneider Electric’s priority is giving partners a reason to call their customers and differentiate themselves, Lord said.

“We do it with software and with services,” he said. “And this whole Rip-Replace-Recycle program is really in the spirit of a technology refresh.”

The online version of the new Smart-UPS is slated to be available starting Sept. 1, Lord said. The line-interactive versions are slated to be available next year, he said. Channel partners will be trained on the new models but will not require new certifications, he said.

When it comes to building UPSes, Compton said he cannot comment on component availability other than to say Schneider Electric will have stock of the new models on Sept. 1.

“We’re gearing ourselves up for a very successful launch and expecting that we’re going to sell a lot of them,” he said. “This is a much-anticipated, complete modernization of a whole new platform change. It’ll be industry-leading. We are going to make sure that we have product in stock so that we can take [it to] the market the way we want to and be very successful with it.”