Power technology vendor Schneider Electric has launched a single platform to control energy and building management systems in critical infrastructure environments such as data centers.

EcoStruxure Foresight Operation is the first system of its kind on the market, the company said, and represents “a transformative leap for the built environment.”

It was unveiled at Schneider Electric’s North America Innovation Summit conference, taking place in Las Vegas this week.

Sadiq Syed, SVP of digital buildings at Schneider Electric, told reporters at the summit that there had previously been a “siloed approach” to managing systems such as HVAC, lighting, and power distribution.

Running disconnected systems can mean critical interdependencies are overlooked, and the consequences of this are often costly: a voltage imbalance may go unnoticed until it damages equipment, solar energy sits idle while grid power runs chillers, and peak demand charges spike due to lack of coordination between building and electrical teams, Schneider contends.

“Our innovation is to unify operations from grid to plug,” Syed said. He added that Foresight is also about making faster deployments: “Customers don’t want us sitting around for two months to commission a system,” he said. “It’s about doing that in days or even hours, and we think make a 50 percent saving on engineering time with Foresight.”

Data centers are one of the initial target markets for the system because the sector is “the most mission-critical in terms of uptime requirements,” Syed said. He told DCD that colocation firms are the “sweet spot” for the system due to their size, but the system is equally applicable to hyperscale facilities.

Schneider said EcoStruxure Foresight Operation can boost operational efficiency by up to 50 percent, and that it comes with built-in redundancy and AI-powered diagnostic capabilities, which enable interrelated electrical and mechanical issues to be resolved 90 percent faster than with separate systems.