Schneider Electric powers up a sustainable energy future with Azure

A bright idea

At Schneider Electric, the mission is to do more than keep the lights on—it’s to empower its customers to make the most of their energy and resources, driving toward smarter buildings and a more sustainable, efficient future.

One of the company’s key offerings is EcoStruxure Power Advisor, a proactive, analytics-based service that delivers optimized performance and reliability for electrical systems that power large facilities. Customers use it to understand the potential risks and issues in power distribution across connected devices, identify gaps or issues in power systems, and assess power management data. Hosted on Amazon Web Services, Power Advisor was a virtual machine (VM)–based monolith with separate databases that were hosted within each VM. But as the solution’s architecture grew, it became burdensome—and costly—for Schneider Electric to scale and control.

The company managed more than 1,500 unique VMs for its customers, each with its own database and separate report generation and web applications. Just to set up and run power quality reports could take five hours, which made it difficult for the company to maintain service-level agreements with customers. And because individual VMs generated the reports, there was a risk that those machines might not be available when customers needed them.

Schneider Electric wanted to simplify its application infrastructure, reduce application costs, streamline scaling to customer demand, and help customers optimize energy performance. The company, which already had an Internet of Things (IoT) platform called EcoStruxure, built on Microsoft Azure, realized it could move Power Advisor to Azure and reconfigure it for multitenancy—without having to rearchitect the entire application. And with such a migration, it could also access the benefits for security, velocity, and availability in Azure.

“We wanted to take advantage of as much of the Azure platform as we could,” says Paul Hill, Principal Cloud Architect at Schneider Electric. “With Azure, we didn’t have to reinvent everything. We could manage the database, its scale, backups, and redundancy right out of the box.”

Sparking a digital transformation journey

Schneider Electric adopted an on-demand Azure platform as a service offering to support workloads like metering diagnostics, full power and electrical system analyses, and advanced algorithms. And it modernized Power Advisor into an easy-to-manage solution that could work more efficiently and at a lower cost, both for itself and for its customers.

The migration team reduced some of the application’s administrative burden by using Azure App Service to move applications from Amazon Web Services to an Azure-managed container; the framework is built in .NET with the C# programming language. It also used Azure DevOps services to help facilitate planning, streamline the migration, and support continuous delivery practices.

One of the biggest opportunities Schneider Electric seized with Azure services was using Azure SQL Database to manage time series data. With SQL Database, Schneider Electric can store its relational data and its time series data in the same database. By doing so, the company can unify datasets and use advanced analytics across them to improve data visibility, generate insights that drive corrective service actions, and optimize system performance and reliability. Schneider Electric also used the Application Insights feature in Azure Monitor to track down performance issues in Power Advisor, helping the company keep the service running smoothly and improving its security posture.

After the migration was complete, Schneider Electric no longer had 1,500 VMs, databases, and reporting apps to track and manage—now, the company and its customers only need to access one database. And Schneider Electric has a cloud-native solution that can quickly scale, with the power to take the company wherever it wants to go next. Recently, Schneider Electric has completed a transition to the SQL Database Hyperscale service tier to further increase its storage capabilities.

“The ability to efficiently manage and control energy is essential for us to operate and compete in the market,” says Melanie Schleeweis-Connor, Global Digital Services Product Manager at Schneider Electric. “We use Azure to create more efficient operations that help us get that control.”

Keeping innovation’s light on

For Schneider Electric, migrating the Power Advisor application has accomplished what the organization hoped it would. Since the solution launched in November 2019, Schneider Electric has consolidated its 1,500 VMs into a centralized, multitenant platform, giving the company a much simpler, more powerful solution. Schneider Electric will reduce costs, drive more profits, and build innovative, competitive features faster. And because it gained almost limitless scale with Azure, Schneider Electric doesn’t have to worry about costs as its data estate grows. It can provide better scalability and support for customers, all at a lower cost.

In fact, the SQL Database Hyperscale migration has helped Schneider Electric reduce database administration requirements to the point that its internal team does not require a dedicated database resource.

But the migration did more than help Schneider Electric optimize its application. The company unlocked a new operating model that has transformed how it develops internally, empowering it to be more agile and customer focused and to deliver more value to customers.

“We can do more now because our small team offloads all the heavy lifting to Azure,” says Hill. “We can ship more features and ultimately give customers a faster, more secure, more feature-rich product.”

Schneider Electric has gone from releasing new features twice a year to releasing them nearly every two weeks. The company has also improved its application’s quality. In the past, resolving an issue meant the company would have to create a hotfix and retroactively apply it to each individual VM. Now, it can deploy a fix to all its customers, instantly.

Customers have responded well to the new Power Advisor, too. The offering’s target market includes large and critical facilities that generate their own power, such as hospitals, where power quality and reliability are crucial. With better visibility into power usage, these facilities will reduce energy waste and use power more efficiently.

“That’s the real value the new Power Advisor provides for larger facilities,” says Hill. “Improving the quality of their power means they will experience fewer outages. And using infrastructure components correctly means they won’t have to be repaired or replaced unexpectedly. There’s a reduction in the impact of replacing infrastructure just because it’s not being used correctly. With Azure, critical pieces of a hospital’s infrastructure will last longer and run more efficiently.”

With a modernized application and data stored in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, Schneider Electric customers can manage high-volume and dynamic data much more easily and with more reliable availability. And because it lowered its engineering costs, the company has been able to reinvest those savings into the product to accelerate quality and innovation. Not only do customers get a better product, but they also get fast access to new or enhanced functionality based on their feedback.

“We’re pushing bug fixes and feedback-driven changes every two weeks, and we’ve now got strategic launches multiple times a year,” says Schleeweis-Connor. “We can conduct a field trial, receive prompt feedback from our users, and then respond in a way that lets customers know we hear them. As a result, our customer relationships are improved, too.”

Now, Schneider Electric has a future-proof, cloud-native toolbox that can help it build any feature or service it needs—without having to worry about scale or complicated, slow-moving integrations. With better visibility into power quality performance and how energy is used, Schneider Electric is better positioned to fulfill its mission statement: to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all.

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