Global leader in critical power and cooling services, APC by Schneider Electric, was recently represented at the AITEC East Africa ICT Summit 2010, which, this year, focused on creating an ICT-enabled economy within the East African IT community. APC by Schneider Electric’s Arlene Nazareth, the territory account manager East Africa for the company, presented on “Introducing the Efficient Enterprise”, touching on predictable, reduced energy consumption without the need to reinvest in a new data centre build out.
“Ten years ago, data centre operators were managing availability, five years ago, they were managing temperature, but today’s data centre customer is concerned with one thing – his electric bill and its effect on his bottom line,” she says.

“At this year’s AITEC Summit, APC focused on the fact that inefficient IT foundations that layer data centre designs are wasting energy and tossing IT dollars out of the window. However, we demonstrated to delegates how simple changes in the way business approaches energy use can help recoup losses and return those dollars to the IT or business unit budgets.”

Data centres not only consume a large amount of electrical power, up to 450 billion kW hours (according to the EPA) but are also the fastest growing segment, says Nazareth, and this is also the case in Kenya, which now has the ICT infrastructure and services in place to become a world-class provider of IT-enabled services.

“Where Kenyan businesses can benefit from the rest of the world’s expertise is building their data centre environments with power and cooling in mind, a luxury most businesses did not have back in the day,” she adds.

“The AITEC summit was introduced to help fast track East Africa’s emergence as a global player in the IT arena and we were only too happy to demonstrate how APC technologies, approaches and solutions can assist them in doing so, with foresight and proper planning.”