New Cloud-based Monitoring Tool Shifts Playing Field for IT Solution Providers

Most successful IT solution providers are adept at growing their customer base without having to hire additional hard-to-find technicians. They manage to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction through superior support without driving up travel and overtime expenses. Now, a new cloud-based Schneider Electric service offering called EcoStruxure™ IT for Partners, allows IT solutions providers to remotely gain new visibility and insights into their customers’ distributed IT, power, and cooling infrastructure. Gone is the need for multiple on-site calls to figure out why a problem is occurring.

In fact, remote monitoring has emerged as a critical value add for end users. However, many IT solution providers have encountered staff workload management challenges fulfilling this customer need through traditional monitoring. Now, since EcoStruxure IT for Partners acts as a Data Center Management as a Service (DMaaS) tool, it’s easy for IT solution providers to add it to their services offerings. EcoStruxure IT for Partners, recently announced at the Xchange 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, will prove to be a great resource for generating recurring services revenues.

The new tool is based on the Schneider Electric EcoStruxure™ IT Expert data center infrastructure management (DCIM) platform. This cloud-based monitoring application enables IT solution providers to deliver a remote monitoring service driven by real-time data that enables predictive recommendations, reducing meantime to repair and improving system availability.

The platform offers IT solution providers a simpler way to offer their customers IT monitoring services. Their customers in turn, benefit from lower operating costs and fewer unplanned downtime events. The complexity of having to work with on-premises DCIM solutions is eliminated through a simple network connection that enables data collection across multiple customer sites.

Simplifying UPS and other monitoring services

EcoStruxure IT for Partners now enables IT solution providers to offer uninterruptible power supply (UPS) monitoring and other services to customers as a cloud-based solution. The customer relationship no longer has to end after the purchase of a UPS or other power and cooling infrastructure solution. By offering a monitoring service that continually checks on the health of UPSs and other data center systems, and makes accurate predictions of when something is about to go wrong, potential problems are remedied before unanticipated downtime occurs.

EcoStruxure IT for Partners is vendor-neutral, and is capable of monitoring IT infrastructure from any vendor. It can run on a mobile device and it allows both customers and service providers to monitor facilities from anywhere on the globe and diagnose any issues that crop up.

EcoStruxure IT offers a deep data lake

The diagnostics of the customer installation also grow in precision over time. That’s because EcoStruxure IT examines data not just from a single customer’s site, but from hundreds of them. Anonymous data from all EcoStruxure IT customers gets fed into a central data lake. From there, intelligent algorithms compare data from a given customer’s site with data from other sites that have similar infrastructure and attributes, including installations from the same industrial vertical.

The data lake provides a detailed source of benchmarking data and enables EcoStruxure IT to identify when a given piece of infrastructure is performing out of scope in comparison to other, similar infrastructure. Rather than just identifying a problem after it occurs, it enables predictive maintenance, alerting stakeholders when a piece of equipment is showing signs of impending failure. Suggestions are then made as to what the issue might be.

Additional benefits for IT solution providers and customers

The EcoStruxure IT Expert solution is highly scalable and affordable. For IT providers not yet generating managed services revenue, it’s a game-changing platform that paves the way to business expansion and higher profitability. This proactive approach offers customers both peace of mind and Certainty in a Connected World. Customers benefit from improved operational efficiency, as IT solutions providers help them avoid problems that can lead to downtime. Operational costs are also reduced because staff spends less time on scheduled maintenance and in break/fix mode. Instead the work shifts to a less costly, more predictive maintenance model where issues are addressed before they result in failures.

The time has never been better for IT solution providers to add monitoring services to their solution portfolio. Check out the EcoStruxure IT for Partners solution page to learn more about how the new EcoStruxure IT for Partners platform can help drive new services business growth.