APC by Schneider Electric Buys Lee Technologies For Data Center Services

APC by Schneider Electric has partnered with Lee Technologies for about 25 years, during which time Lee sold APC hardware to customers primarily in the Washington, D.C. area, said Rob McKernan, North American President of the Rueil-Malmaison, France-based company. The company APC by Schneider Electric, better-known as APC, resulted from the 2007 acquisition of APC by Schneider Electric.

Lee Technologies recently expanded its business to include remote monitoring of data centers, McKernan said.

“With everything going on with virtualization, the biggest data centers are putting a lot of pressure on power consumption,” McKernan said. “APC by Schneider Electric has been involved in cooling and monitoring. But one area Lee brings us is on-site monitoring of the physical layer.”

In addition to Lee Technologies’ monitoring technology, the company also brings APC by Schneider Electric experience in helping solution providers handling the physical layer involved with power and cooling, McKernan said.

“We’ve heard a lot of customers say they’re trying to build the most energy-efficient data centers, or ‘I thought I was building the most energy-efficient data centers,’” he said. “By working with Lee Technologies, solution providers can help customers be sure.”

Lee Technologies has about 330 employees, 170 of whom are based at client locations, said John Lee, CEO and chairman of Lee Technologies.

“This is an important piece of our business model,” Lee said. “Under the Schneider name, we’ll be able to do big things in this business.”

Lee Technologies currently does monitoring for its own customers and for other solution providers, and McKernan expects that under APC those services can be resold by other solution providers.

“Our partners don’t all have the electrical or mechanical experience to do the service today,” he said. “But there’s an opportunity for them to do it with our guys standing next to them.”

While APC by Schneider Electric has been partnering with Lee Technologies for 25 years, it decided to make the acquisition in order to better scale Lee’s technology outside of its traditional Washington, D.C. area, McKernan said.

“This allows us to round out our portfolio of solutions and products so that partners can go in and talk to customers about electrical and mechanical issues related to their data centers,” he said.

APC by Schneider Electric currently has about 8,000 solution provider partners, a good portion of whom are selling products into data centers,” McKernan said.

“It is our contention that any partner selling hardware or software into data centers can find opportunities to talk to customers about the electrical and mechanical part of the business,” he said. “So if a reseller is selling virtualization, servers, storage, or rack mount equipment, they have the opportunity to take advantage of these services.”

Lee Technologies reported revenue in 2010 of about $140 million.

The price of the acquisition, which has already closed, was not disclosed.