Schneider Electric Releases New White Paper, TradeOff Tool, Focuses on How DCIM Addresses Hybrid IT Management Challenges

Schneider Electric, the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, has released White Paper 281, “How Modern DCIM Addresses CIO Management Challenges within Distributed, Hybrid IT Environments” and a supporting TradeOff Tool, both available for immediate use.

The new White Paper focuses on Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software and takes a close look at the rapidly-changing role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) as IT has taken center stage in the past few years. The document demonstrates how the success of a CIO is ultimately rooted in a solid foundation of maintaining resilient, secure, and sustainable IT operations. In an environment of highly distributed hybrid IT, this goal becomes harder to accomplish.

“Business requirements are forcing CIOs to hybridize their data center and IT portfolio architecture by placing IT capacity in colocation facilities and building out capacity at the local edge – sometimes in a big way,” said author Patrick Donovan, Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Center. “CIOs have always been tasked with managing and maintaining resilient and secure operations, but generally have been focused on core data center sites. Now, on top of having many more distributed sites needing resiliency and security, they are also being asked to report on the sustainability of their IT operations. This marks a real sea change in terms of their responsibilities.”

Thin the 16-page paper, Donovan describes the evolution of enterprise IT portfolios and explores the resulting management challenges. He explains how modern DCIM software has evolved and is more optimized for increasingly distributed environments. Distributed IT makes security a top concern along with the need for improved resiliency and tracking and reporting of the IT operation’s environmental impact.

A new Schneider Electric TradeOff Tool, the DCIM Monitoring Value Calculator for Distributed IT, supports the White Paper and provides user-selectable inputs and adjustable assumptions to perform “what-if” scenarios to see the ROI/payback of monitoring software. It considers factors like downtime, staffing, security, and environmental incidents, and cashflow.

“We wanted to create a useful framework to help customers quantify the potential value of DCIM in their operations and we are excited for them to try our tool,” said TradeOff Tool creator Wendy Torell, Senior Research Analyst at Schneider Electric’s Energy Management Research Center. “We designed it to be user friendly and it easily adapts to the customer’s specific environment and level of maturity.”

Donovan, Torell, and fellow members of the Energy Management Resource Center conduct research that helps Schneider Electric and its customers make informed business and technology decisions backed by facts and research. Much of the research is made freely available to the public.