Schneider Electric has announced a grid operations platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as part of its EcoStruxure Grid portfolio and backed by Microsoft Azure’s open cloud computing platform.

The French company is offering a deployment environment that enables grid planning and operations to be hosted and managed in the cloud.

As the industry experiences significant disruption and technology advancing at a rapid pace, traditional ways of deploying software and associated services are changing. Schneider’s platform-as-a-service was built to answer the questions grid operators face today.

While the cloud continues to demonstrate value across industries, grid operators can gain value with simplified deployments, incremental enhancements, increased scalability and reduced maintenance, all while enabling managed and advisory services. Simplified, stepwise, cyber-secure approaches are in demand for all aspects of grid management, both IT and OT.

Schneider is delivering the service on Azure in collaboration with Microsoft to address the demands of critical infrastructure for the energy industry.

“Microsoft’s commitment to this collaboration is helping drive digital transformation for people, organisations and the industry at large,” said Alexis Grenon, senior vice president at Schneider Electric. “Together we are working to help our customers manage more reliable, efficient, sustainable and secure grids today and into the future.”

Schneider has a history of delivering asset management and edge management cloud services to utilities and is now extending that success to operations management, with EcoStruxure DERMS (distributed energy resource management systems) and EcoStruxure ADMS (advanced distribution management system) running on Azure, including use cases such as DER (distributed energy resource) management, outage management, grid planning, and user training. This is unlocking value that can be delivered to a much broader market where smaller organisations can realise the same benefits as the largest ones. This progression provides increased value to customers and enables a more agile approach to delivering innovation.

“Microsoft is supporting Schneider Electric in delivering business solutions that allow customers to focus more on their operations and less on managing software infrastructure,” said Darryl Willis, corporate vice president at Microsoft. “This further enables Schneider Electric to address the utility industry’s most pressing business challenges with the flexibility, reliability and security of Azure.”

The announcement comes on the heels of Schneider Electric’s ranking top of the Guidehouse Insights Leaderboard for DERMS vendors report. The DERMS product addresses utility and grid management needs from a holistic perspective, offering an end-to-end approach to DER management.

The EcoStruxure Grid portfolio demonstrates the company’s commitment to a more digital and electric world and, together with the grid operations platform-as-a-service, supports the growth of distributed energy resources, microgrids, energy communities, and other flexible resources across digitally planned, designed and operated lifecycles. Grids of the future can be powered by data and integrated network models that are more reliable, flexible, efficient and secure.