Schneider Electric unveils Grid Operations Platform as a Service on Microsoft Azure

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Schneider Electric has added a new Grid Operations Platform as a Service to its EcoStruxure platform, which has been designed to address the demands of critical energy infrastructure for the energy industry.

Backed by Microsoft Azure’s open cloud computing platform, the offering provides a deployment environment for grid planning operations solutions to be hosted and managed in the cloud.

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Schneider says the service has been built as an answer to the challenges that grid operators face today, enabling simplified deployments, incremental enhancements, increased scalability, reduced maintenance, as well as facilitating managed and advisory services.

“Microsoft’s commitment to this collaboration is helping drive digital transformation for people, organisations and the industry at large” commented Alexis Grenon, SVP Digital Grid at Schneider Electric. “Together we are working to help our customers manage more reliable, efficient, sustainable and secure grids today and into the future.”

Building on Schneider’s history of delivering asset management and edge management cloud solutions to utilities, the firm is extending its capabilities to operations management.

New EcoStruxure DERMS (distributed energy resource management systems) and ExoStruxure ADMS (advanced distribution management system) run on Azure and include use cases such as distributed energy resource (DER) management, outage management, grid planning, and user training, to help enable smaller organisations to realise the same benefits as larger ones.

With the addition of its new Grid Operations as a Service platform on Azure, Schneider says it is aiming to support the growth of distributed energy resources, microgrids, energy communities, and other flexible resources across digitally planned, designed and operated lifecycles.

“Microsoft is supporting Schneider Electric in delivering business solutions that allow customers to focus more on their operations and less on managing software infrastructure,” said Darryl Willis, Corporate Vice President, Energy Industry at Microsoft.

“This further enables Schneider Electric to address the utility industry’s most pressing business challenges with the flexibility, reliability and security of Azure."

Daniel Todd

Dan is a freelance writer and regular contributor to ChannelPro, covering the latest news stories across the IT, technology, and channel landscapes. Topics regularly cover cloud technologies, cyber security, software and operating system guides, and the latest mergers and acquisitions.

A journalism graduate from Leeds Beckett University, he combines a passion for the written word with a keen interest in the latest technology and its influence in an increasingly connected world.

He started writing for ChannelPro back in 2016, focusing on a mixture of news and technology guides, before becoming a regular contributor to ITPro. Elsewhere, he has previously written news and features across a range of other topics, including sport, music, and general news.