In India, energy demand is shifting to electrified, digital systems, and partners must build for the full lifecycle

Schneider Electric’s Amit Sharma outlines why manufacturing, monitoring‑led reliability and lifecycle services are becoming central to partner relevance in India.

India’s energy and power market is entering a structural shift, one that goes beyond individual projects or technology trends. While data centres and AI infrastructure dominate headlines, the immediate demand shaping buying decisions across the country is coming from industrial electrification, increasingly combined with digital monitoring and lifecycle-led engagement.

Speaking to CRN India, Schneider Electric’s vice president, power products and digital energy business, Greater India Zone, Amit Sharma, said India’s current demand cycle is being driven by how industries consume and manage energy, rather than just by AI-led data centres alone.

“All of these demand shifts are interlinked, but they are converging towards electrification,” Sharma said. Industries, he noted, are prioritising energy efficiency across manufacturing and process environments.

Despite the momentum building around data centres, Sharma said they are still at an early stage in India’s market evolution.

“In the Indian context, data centres are just starting,” he said. While the trajectory is clear over the long term, the more immediate pull is coming from large-scale manufacturing setups and the ecosystems around them.

As new automobile plants, semiconductor facilities, and industrial clusters come online, they generate demand not only at the core facility but also across ancillary industries. This, in turn, increases the requirement for reliable, monitored, and resilient energy systems.

“That is what is driving demand in India today,” Sharma said, adding that data centres will eventually emerge as a major growth engine, but are not yet the primary driver of power infrastructure spending.

This shift aligns with Schneider Electric’s broader positioning of India. India is currently the company’s third-largest market worldwide, supported by over six decades of presence, 31 factories, and a footprint across over 500 cities. The country also serves as a global R&D hub for Schneider, with over 6,000 engineers working across digital, automation, and energy technologies.

Reliability is becoming a digital challenge

As power consumption rises across industries, households, and infrastructure, Sharma said the challenge for enterprises is no longer limited to physical electrical capacity.

Sharma pointed to a sharp increase in power consumption over the coming years, noting that rising demand will place greater strain on distribution systems and reliability.

“This is true for industries and it is equally true for data centres,” Sharma said, pointing to rising rack densities and power requirements.

However, the most underestimated gap, according to him, lies on the digital side of power systems.

“Reliability today is not just about physical infrastructure,” he said. Many enterprises still operate without embedded sensing and IoT-based monitoring across electrical assets, limiting the ability to capture real-time data or generate actionable insight.

Without continuous measurement, systems cannot be analysed for asset health or failure prediction. Once data becomes available, it can be processed at the edge or in the cloud to deliver predictive insights, an area where machine learning and AI are expected to play a growing role.

“You can only control and improve what you measure,” Sharma said, indicating that monitoring is the starting point for reliability and optimisation.

From CapEx to lifecycle economics

This shift in how energy systems are deployed is also reshaping how customers engage with vendors and partners.

According to Sharma, customers are moving away from individual product purchases and towards evaluating the total lifecycle cost of the systems they deploy. As a result, buying behaviour is moving from CapEx-led transactions to system-level solutions that integrate products, software, and services.

Schneider Electric’s partner ecosystem mirrors this evolution through multiple engagement layers.

Distributors continue to play a critical role in product availability across cities and customer sizes, while panel builders and system partners engineer Schneider components into integrated solutions.

However, Sharma positioned EcoXpert partners as the most strategically important layer in this model. These partners work across Schneider’s full stack, including products, software, and systems, tailoring solutions to customer requirements and remaining engaged through delivery and ongoing operation.

“With software embedded into these systems, lifecycle services become the most important area for recurring revenue,” he said.

Continuous data availability enables partners to move beyond sales and into long-term service models built around monitoring, optimisation, and system performance — creating predictable, recurring revenue streams.

Assessments as the entry point to value-led engagement

Sharma said assessment-led engagement plays an important role in enabling this transition.

Depending on the customer, Schneider may engage directly or through partners. In parallel, partners are enabled to conduct energy audits, power quality assessments, and evaluations across parameters such as harmonics and efficiency.

Partners are supported with Schneider’s platforms, including EcoStruxure, advisor tools, and power monitoring systems, allowing them to first act as assessors and then as advisors. From there, they can recommend appropriate remedies and deliver solutions using Schneider’s systems and software.

This approach allows partners to integrate deeper into the customer lifecycle, build references, and establish trust, particularly in smaller markets where proximity and responsiveness matter.

“Partners are closer to the customer and can service them faster,” Sharma said.

Managing customer ownership and channel alignment

On large data centre and critical infrastructure projects, Sharma said customer ownership is not fixed and depends largely on how customers prefer to engage.

In some cases, Schneider Electric works directly with customers; in others, partners lead the engagement with Schneider providing support. The model, he said, is anchored around two principles - technology leadership and partnerships.

“Our growth is closely tied to the growth of our partners,” Sharma said.

To manage overlaps, Schneider operates defined governance mechanisms to ensure structured engagement and to address potential channel conflict.

Looking ahead, Sharma avoided narrowing partner readiness down to a single capability.

Instead, he said Schneider evaluates a combination of factors, including a partner’s appetite to grow, understanding of the market, and willingness to align with Schneider’s ecosystem. Business strength, market access, manufacturing capability, and engineering depth all play a role in how partners are assessed.

This broader evaluation reflects how electrification, digitisation, and services are increasingly converging across Schneider’s focus areas, spanning industries, homes, data centres, and grid infrastructure.

While AI-led digital infrastructure is emerging as a significant growth driver in the medium term, Sharma said current opportunities across electrification and intelligent energy systems continue to accelerate as customers seek future-ready, resilient solutions.

For partners, that convergence signals a clear direction, which is building capability for the full lifecycle will be central to staying relevant as India’s energy systems become more electric, more digital, and more data-driven.