Schneider Electric elected to IIC steering committee

Schneider Electric has been elected to the steering committee of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). Through this appointment, Schneider Electric aims to take a more central role alongside thought leaders from AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel in developing recommendations for industry specifications and developing frameworks to speed the adoption of industrial IoT technologies around the world. The IoT-enabled market is set to grow to $10 trillion annually by 2025, according to McKinsey, through IoT’s ability to enable higher levels of collaboration, change the way goods are produced and influence the way we work.

John Tuccillo, senior vice president, industry and government affairs, will represent Schneider Electric on the IIC steering committee. The IIC’s executive director, Dr Richard Soley, said: “The next wave of transformation in manufacturing and plants is coming from how connectivity can yield even more intelligence. This is where innovation from companies like Schneider Electric and our other members come into play. Like our other members, Schneider Electric’s innovation in the fields of energy and process efficiency and its range of connected products and solutions will help fuel IoT to the next level — where lives, processes and whole supply chains will see significant transformation.”

In addition, Schneider Electric has entered into a collaboration with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (HKUST-MIT) Research Alliance Consortium to advance IoT solutions and adoption.

IoT technologies are fundamental to Schneider Electric’s focus areas — in market segments such as water, oil and gas, data centres, mining, utilities, food and beverages, health care and smart cities — as a way to further maximise efficiency and sustainability for customers. Through partnerships like the work with the IIC and HKUST-MIT, Schneider Electric is focused on developing new technologies and services that will drive intelligence, efficiency and connectivity to help customers meet these new and emerging challenges.

Related to this, Schneider Electric has announced a new global brand strategy, Life Is On, fuelled by the company’s operational intelligence approach to IoT. The approach is claimed to transform how people and organisations consume energy, better automate industrial processes and increase the quality of business decisions while improving their lives.

The Life Is On brand strategy will help clearly show how the company is helping its customers around the world take advantage of this fundamental shift, leveraging Schneider Electric’s expertise in the operational technology (OT) that controls our society’s most important processes and connecting it to the information technology (IT) that we rely on to simplify our lives and make better decisions. This approach relies on optimised automation and control, advanced remote management, predictive maintenance, enabling managed services, advanced analytics and generation of actionable information to drive informed decision-making in our homes, manufacturing facilities, data centres, buildings and cities.

“We build energy management and automation technologies that ensure Life Is On everywhere, for everyone and at every moment. We think access to energy is a fundamental right for everyone on our planet and we engineer solutions to make energy safe, reliable, efficient, sustainable and connected,” said Jean-Pascal Tricoire, chairman and CEO, Schneider Electric.

“We invest heavily in innovation, connecting our products and systems through the Internet of Things to our portfolio of software, making energy more distributed and connected. Our solutions serve the key markets of residential, buildings, data centre and networks, energy and infrastructure and industry, globally. We are committed to helping our customers succeed in this new reality by transforming their businesses and organisations into more connected enterprises — with deep, real-time, operational intelligence.”