Schneider Electric appoints Irish IT VP

With an outstanding track record for growing international sales revenues and leading business transformation within both the emerging and mature markets of Central Europe and Asia, Ivan is the perfect choice to replace previous VP Vincent Barro, who has moved to a new role managing the IT Division in Switzerland.  

For the past decade Ivan has served Schneider Electric as business development for its Single-Phase UPS business in Central Eastern Europe and Israel, covering a region of fifteen countries and twelve different languages. He has also held roles as Country Manager and Vice President, IT Business for the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Vietnam.

“Ireland presents a perfect opportunity to showcase our industry-leading edge computing offers.” Said Ivan. “I’m proud to be moving to a new European country that’s seen such significant development in both the technology and data centre sectors, and I’m looking forward to working as part of the Ireland team to drive the business into a new period of accelerated growth.”

In recent years Ireland has become one of the world’s fastest-growing data centre hot spots, with a significant amount of investment largely from Internet giants and other major IT companies who have constructed centralised facilities to meet the demands of both national and international cloud computing requirements.

Factors driving the adoption of cloud services in Ireland include the growth and reliability of network speed, service availability; increased virtualisation of both storage and computing power and the resulting lowering of capital costs, particularly to end-users.

However, the very success of cloud computing has seen new issues emerge. Driven by the surge in digital services including the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), data traffic shows no sign of slowing. This trend is leading to Edge Computing, in which smaller, micro data centres are distributed across networks to deliver more reliable compute power and support business service demands. Edge Computing significantly decreases the data volume that must be transferred, the consequent traffic and therefore also reduces cost.

In March 2017 Schneider Electric introduced the Micro Data Center (DC) Xpress line of connected products, making it faster, easier and more cost effective to build and deploy data centres at the network edge. Designed to allow IT equipment to be pre-installed by the customer, partner or integrator before shipment, it features complete data centre physical infrastructure and management software in a single self-contained and secure enclosure.

“Ireland is a thriving hub of data centre activity.” Ivan continued. “I believe there is a large requirement for edge computing services to support our growing number of colocation customers. I also believe that within time, the country could rival other destinations and become as desirable as Amsterdam or London.”