Schneider Electric to acquire a controlling stake in ETAP
Super quick: Schneider Electric announced that it will acquire a controlling stake in ETAP Automation Inc. You may be familiar with ETAP: their platform for modeling electrical power systems is integrated with just about every plant design system on the market.
ETAP will continue to operate as an independent software vendor and will remain manufacturer-agnostic (in other words, not favoring Schneider Electric’s energy solutions). That said, Schneider Electric believes that “ETAP’s solutions will strengthen Schneider Electric’s position as a major player in electrical design, by offering customers unique software capabilities to model, simulate and operate utilities and energy intensive systems as designed, and further enhance Schneider Electric’s digital twin capabilities in Power, Grid and mission-critical sectors, following the Group’s recent strategic investment in IGE+XAO and Alpi”.
The company continued, this “strategic transaction is in line with Schneider Electric’s vision to grow its suite of best in class, end-to-end software and its commitment to helping customers on their digital transformation journey to drive sustainability, efficiency and resiliency across the lifecycle from CapEx to OpEx”.
Details weren’t announced and it sounds as though there are still some regulatory hurdles to overcome.
This is interesting for many reasons, especially since the companies know one another very well. Back in 2015, Schneider Electric announced that its services business would standardize on ETAP for its projects in order to “leverage the advanced, next-generation technology of the integrated ETAP software suite to further increase its productivity through greater efficiencies. ETAP provides Schneider Electric higher design reliability and quality, rule-based analysis, and automation capabilities that will help to optimize and fast track project engineering design and analysis processes.”
We may find out more about the transaction when Schneider Electric announced Q4 results early next year.
