Schneider Electric to grow IT business

BALI, Indonesia – The Philippines is seen to be one of the growth areas for the IT business of European multinational firm Schneider Electric as large companies expand their data centers while small and medium enterprises (SMEs) move to and expand data centers amid the rapid growth of digital data.

Digital data has seen exponential growth globally in the past few years as more and more devices are being used to connect to the Internet.

It is estimated that 30 billion devices will be connected to the Internet globally by 2020, according to American IT company EMC, which will create the need for big data centers moving forward.

And this trend is seen as a big opportunity for Schneider Electric’s IT business, Pankaj Sharma, Schneider Electric vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Canalys Channels Forum held here.

“For our business, we believe it’s a lot of opportunity because more and more data are getting transferred, meaning more data centers are getting built, whether on-premise or on the cloud, which means we are providing more and more physical infrastructure,” he said.

The Philippines, in particular, has seen rapid economic growth in the past couple of years, thanks to the dollar receipts from the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector and the strong consumer spending fueled by overseas Filipino workers (OFW) remittances.

With the anticipation of the continued BPO sector expansion and more Filipinos using mobile devices to connect to the Internet, the French global firm is investing heavily in the Philippine IT business to seize this opportunity, Schneider Electric IT managing director Leonardo Santos said.

“We’re very bullish of the opportunity we have in the Philippines. We believe its going to be a growth area in the next few years, particularly in the enterprise space, while maintaining our presence in the home and business community,” he said.

Driving this bullishness in the country is the country’s major telecommunication providers and big BPOs expansion, which are heavily reliant on big data centers, Santos said.

A trend that’s also emerging in the country is that SMEs want to get into cloud data storage, he added.

Schneider Electric has a diverse array of data center management solutions to provide businesses with data centers that are capable of storing large data, scalable, flexible enough, and energy-efficient to respond to the imminent demands of big data.

“Data center is where the growth will be in the future, that’s where we are investing heavily while maintaining our strength in home and office business network,” Santos said.