Schneider Electric announced a suite of power-monitoring software tailored to data centers at its annual press event in Chicago Wednesday.

Called StruxureWare Power Monitoring for Data Centers, the software package offers a variety of real-time monitoring, analysis and reporting capabilities for electrical infrastructure in data centers.

The data center suite is first in a line of software packages Schneider is rolling out, each tailored to a specific industry. The company expects to make similar suites available for water, healthcare and grid business verticals “over the coming months”.

At the core of the suite is Schneider’s StruxureWare Power Monitoring software version 7.0. The company has tweaked it, however, to adapt it to unique needs of data center infrastructure.

Capabilities the data center package offers include identifying root causes of unexpected events within the electrical infrastructure, power-quality measurements, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measurements, calculation of losses in the power-distribution chain, monitoring of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and generator power loading and auditing of generator-system testing.

The software enables monitoring and analysis for medium-voltage, low-voltage and IT-floor power. The package includes hardware, software and communication components, integrated with professional services.

StruxureWare is Schneider’s umbrella brand name for monitoring software for enterprises. Jeff Drees, president of Schneider’s US unit, said StruxureWare was a big next bet for the company, forcing it to rethink the way it delivers software to customers.

The company now wants to enable decision-making at the enterprise level based on its view into all layers of the infrastructure to help the enterprise conserve resources. It is a way to bring together energy management, power availability, process control, security, asset management, sustainability planning and business operation to make decisions based on a holistic view of the business.

Schneider reported €22.4bn in revenue for 2011, the data center sector contributing 16% of this number. The business is third in size after the French conglomerate’s “industrial and machines” and “utilities and infrastructure” businesses.

Schneider generated US$5.8bn in revenue from sales in the US. The biggest chunk of that came from selling its power products, but the second-largest business in the US was IT, which is another way to call its data center customers.